Juliet Was a Surprise (17 page)

“Well, if it's grizzly bears you're after,” Jungle Jane lisped at him from the dank, musky cavity of her cabin window, batting her one eyelash as she did, because one of her eyes lacked a lid, having been sliced off sometime during the squirrel-roast, “why don't you just head round to my backyard and shoot one?”

It was the final climatic enormity whose name no one dared breathe, the news of which struck terror in the hearts of all men, and animals too, and even some fish, for though they generally lived underwater, and lacked ears, they could pick up on the hubbub and general nervousness of all the humans and animals stomping around in terror up here, especially on the beach.

Four Corners

J
ack decides, again. Tonight's the night.

He drains his wine, a favourite pinot noir that tastes thin this evening, gets up to pour another and brings the bottle back to the couch with him. This doesn't have to be painful, Cheryl won't necessarily make a scene. She is reasonable. Which is maybe part of the problem. But you never know with reasonable types. And hell hath no fury like. He
can
conceive of Cheryl throwing something. He can also see a lolling sadness, and he wonders if that wouldn't be harder to take.

She's in her bathroom standing in front of the mirror and he can see parts of her only when an elbow shoots out or she tosses that beautiful hair of hers. She's using a very throwable brush to pull through it, the one vanity she indulges, despite or perhaps because she's not far from getting too old for long hair. She's what? Thirty-two? Something about the brush, maybe a hollow core, amplifies each stroke so it's throaty and attentionseeking. Cheryl would have been pretty in the 1940s, that pie-face thing that for some reason rubs him wrong. Tonight she's wearing some makeup as well. Though she always applies it tastefully it has the effect of making her look slutty. Like a
librarian can look slutty. No, not the librarian—the
library
. Like a library can look slutty.

He should slow down. He had a couple before he came over, and this watery wine is too easy to swallow.

“Some more?” He hoists the bottle, waggles it at her back.

Cheryl meets his eye in the mirror, shakes her head and instructively glances to her full glass on the counter beside her.

He's tired of this. All of it. Waiting, here on her couch. Waiting as she gets dressed for work when he sleeps over; waiting while she sautés pine nuts in her special stupid pine nut pan as she makes them one of what he calls her adventure salads, showing off with weird fruit in it, or quail, even goose. Waiting, like tonight, as she pretties herself to go out. She has no TV, so he has three choices while he waits. He can watch her leaning at herself in the mirror. He can thumb through her coffee-table scatter of
National Geographic
, an annual gift subscription from her father. The latest cover is a whale in blue depths, with articles inside on Kathmandu and “The Friendly Bacterium.”

Or, strike three, he can gaze beyond her living room, through the picture window, to a block away and the luminescence of that intersection. Four Corners. There's a Four Corners Café across the street, down the road a No Corners Pizza—ha, ha—and a 4 Korners Kutters hair salon in the base of her building. Surrounded by miles of farms and fields, here two small highways happen to cross, so a collection of high-rise condos and strip malls have gathered for no reason except this meaningless intersection. The worst thing about it: four kittycorner gas stations fight for business. Gas stations should locate for convenience, not competition, but here you have the only
four gas stations for miles glowing hard at each other, matching each other's price changes down to a fraction of a cent within minutes. Cheryl has lived at Four Corners for years, and it is maybe the worst thing about her: choosing a location whose main feature, whose only feature, is an intersection.

Cheryl claims to hate Four Corners, but at the same time it had carried a good part of their early conversations here. “I have this nice huge window,” she'd said, smiling, the first time he came over, “but look what I have to look at!”

“Wow,” Jack had said, shaking his head for her at those gas stations.

One time he actually saw the Four Corners' garish flare reflected on the saliva of her teeth. He saw that in some moods, the primary colours down there might scare him.

He'd added, “I bet you can see that intersection from space.”

“Well, exactly. I hate it!” But chirpy, smiling. When he asked her why she'd picked this spot, she hesitated, then said, merely, “It was convenient.”

She told him once that “this awful view from my wonderful window” was a contradiction that summed up her life. For three years she's been a secretary in the building where Jack works, but she claims she's saving to go to grad school, some sort of archeology. She says she's out of place at Four Corners, even suggests that it's a display of everything banal North America
lacks
. But Jack's recurring, somewhat cruel thought is that she doesn't seem out of place here at all, even though a few times she called this apartment “my aerie,” as if she owned some special, eagle-eye perspective the rest of them here didn't.

“Sorry!” she says, pivoting from the mirror to roll her eyes for him. She takes a polite sip of her wine, as if to stay on the same page.

Cheryl all smiles, always.

He feels bad piling up evidence against her. He knows he's preparing for later, stoking his resolve with everything negative. He watches her, fingers teasing, elbows working. Her bathroom sounds, of tubes clicking shut and water rushing on and off, come to him now as irritation, though there had been a time, not so long ago, when such sounds were alluring, a big part of
la différence
.

He drains his wine and puts his feet up, kicking aside the yellow-framed whale. Even as he does so he feels in the gesture the chickenshit insolence that lately has been creeping into his way with her. (Hadn't Shannon done exactly that to him? Before dumping him?) Tonight he will be forthright and honest. Cheryl deserves that much.

Their first night together, Jack thought he might love her. There was that moment. They worked on different floors but had been vaguely aware of each other (they agreed) for a couple of years, and then, six months ago, against all common sense, they linked up in the bar after an office party. Later they came back here and had sex, and then he was leaving, leaning against her bedroom door frame, looking down at her. He had nothing to say and maybe he blew her a kiss. She was drowsy and snug in bundled clouds of beige comforter, her face cute in its frame of tousled hair and billowing pillows. She smiled with one side of her mouth, a smirk really, a slightly saucy look signalling a particular and private contentment. Then out of their silence,
looking at him sleepy-eyed from her bed, that loveliest smirk, she whispered, “I'm the mayor of Blanketville.” That's all she said, waiting for him to leave. He had never heard anyone say anything like this. I am the mayor of Blanketville. He could think of nothing good enough to say back.

“What you smiling at, Jack?”

She's watching, amused, from the bathroom. A hint of that same smirk. How do these things happen?

“Nothing.”

“You're awfully patient with me. How's the wine?”

“Thin.”

“That's one reason to gulp it, I suppose.” Smiling, having checked out his empty glass and nearly empty bottle.

“Well, glug glug, then,” he says, and pours some more.

It has to be tonight. He decided this morning after her call and her coy announcement that tonight was special and she'd made reservations at Mister Mario's. He said okay warily. Special night? They got together a half year ago. Conceivably, tonight was some sort of girly anniversary to her. Was that it? At the start they went out a month after that first time, then it was every second week for a while, and now weekends together are assumed. Cheryl is thirty-two, he is thirty-six—a dangerous age for single people, who too often settle for less. He'd warned her right off that ever since his marriage to Shannon ended, casual was all he could do until further notice. To her credit she never pushed, never spoke of a future together. But how can her future not be in her thoughts? Once you are in one of these assumed-weekend things, some notion of forever
has
to—

“Just about!” she sings from the bathroom. Something clicks shut.

“No hurry.” As if for ammunition, he eyes the gas stations. She's a goddamn secretary and he's an executive, what the hell, how is that not an embarrassing cliché? Though maybe that's all he really hates here—appearances—so of course he's a shallow shit for seeing it in these terms, but what can you do?

Out the window, in a symmetry that mocks him, exactly one car sits at each of the four gas stations. Life unfolds here on rails. It is so boring. He can't help himself. “Maybe one of them will clean their windshield.”

“Tonight I especially— One of who?”

It's her forcing an anniversary on him that's made him this angry, he decides. Maybe he feels some panic, that typically male thing, tonight is the sound of tires screeching to a halt, so it's all kind of funny, forgivable. Okay, how much
does
he like her? Sex is good—always for him, usually for her. Check. There's familiarity with its contempt but not too much, check. Maybe there's some love too, who knows about that? Her face is always pleasant, even sparky, check. And there's maybe a bit of something, let's call it beauty, that's more than skin-deep. She has that quirky humour he lacks—maybe that's one area where she's superior, if that's the word, check. There's her coltishness in bed that makes him shy of his own inability to make any noise. He remembers, those first times, seeing her as a young dragon when she breathed in that rough way through her widened nostrils just before she came. Check. Despite her neat-as-a-pin secretary look, and her apartment here in geometric hell, she does have a bohemian spirit, and maybe a worldliness that
came from her travels with her father, who is a professor of something. Her place has primitive oddities, carved or kilned, scattered on windowsills. Some look truly fierce—scrunched faces that survived fire, lips sticking out to make a fart noise, to maybe lure another crazy, fire-hardened lover. He enjoyed that one evening going through her photo albums, and probably should have told her so. The young Cheryl on a camel. Older, launching an outrigger canoe. In one glorious shot she was maybe seventeen, brow-knit but tanned and bare-breasted, wearing a grass skirt, surrounded by scowling black kids with bellies that—

“Here we go!” she sings, and water rushes on.

The fact is, he's never been sure about her. He is nervous now. His desires knock and lurch, fighting each other.

“Ready!” she sings again, and water shuts off.

Out the window it looked windy and cold, so they walk coatless through the underground parking, at the distant end of which is a back entrance to Mister Mario's. He finds it incongruous that Four Corners not only has a high-end restaurant but that it can be accessed without going outside, and through Cheryl's garage. Jesus, he can hear a realtor assuring her,
All you need is right here in Four Corners
. But the “Mario's Lasagna” is just maybe his favourite meal of all time, plus the waiters know him now and come unasked to douse his with the spiced-oil bottle, smiling patiently because the oil is really for the gourmet pizzas.

The underground garage smells like they all do, and the cars are pathetically of a sort; her little Ford fits right in, but that's not the point. Cheryl has him gently by the right biceps,
the way she likes to walk when they go out. Early on she joked how she enjoys “playing executive-girlfriend.”

“So I have this surprise for you tonight.” Her eyes are brown, and they go in and in.

“I've gathered.”

“I was afraid you might not come if I told you what. You're such a bachelor.” She tosses her hair and smiles at him, vixen of surprises.

Jesus, he was right. He should announce himself now, here in underground parking, do away with dinner altogether, but she holds open Mister Mario's door and waits for him, seeing his hesitation.

“Cheryl? Maybe—”

“Let's just go!” Mischief in her eyes, her smile is eager. “He could be here already.”

“He?”

“My dad.” She scowls at him. “Darling?” she mocks, cutesy, from the forties. “Tonight I'm taking you to meet my parent.”

JACK'S LASAGNA IS ON ITS WAY
, as is her seafood cannelloni. They've ordered already because her dad is “chronically unpredictable.” She announced this proudly, like he was an artist of some sort.

“He'll be here soon.”

“Why didn't we pick him up?” They're barely thirty miles from the airport.

“He actually doesn't like that. Then he'd have to worry about actually
being
there.”

“Which would ruin his chronic unpredictability.”

“Well, yeah. He'll take a cab.” Cheryl looks away fondly. “He came home once in a helicopter. Mom was alive. We were in Montreal, the outskirts. Big loud helicopter landed in the field across the road. Highly illegal, I think.”

Cheryl explains what it is her father does. Jack knows most of it. Engineer, consultant for Third World projects, helping natives do the most with the least, etc. He won a UN award. He should by rights be filthy rich but isn't. Some projects he seeded with his own money. Countries Jack had hardly heard of. Always travelling. Tonight he has a five-hour stopover and phoned Cheryl to see if they could visit.

Clearly, her father is her hero. Jack will wait and see.

They eat their salads, and Cheryl mentions a few of the trips she's taken with him. Borneo, Ivory Coast, Costa Rica several times. Jack drinks a slightly more robust pinot.