Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  On spec, Evie entered Médéry, Jean-Gabriel into the online archive and her monitor rewarded her with a flood of hits. She limited the results to articles with photos, and pulled up a shot from the mid-seventies. The image was fuzzy when she magnified it to two hundred percent but even pixelated she could make out her sly Friday night guest. His hair had redeployed itself in the intervening years. Back then he was blessed with blanket coverage, although the sideburns and nape did carry more than their fair share of the load as the tufted times demanded. Evie patted herself on the back for her hunch. It was rare that she landed one. Jean-Gabriel Médéry, the playwright who had le tout Québec fawning at his feet ever since his first play hit the boards was living the Clark Kent life on the first floor of her building.

  There were far too many article snippets crowding her screen to read in one sitting, so Evie picked her way through the laundry list of headlines, soaking up a detail here and there. Médéry’s plays, she discovered, had gone on to be staged worldwide, garnering raves from all the top critics. Evie even faintly recollected having read one in high school, but in the way of most required reading, the content was flushed from her memory’s holding tank the minute she handed in her exam. Now she cursed her teenaged bubbleheadedness. The time had come for more in-depth research so the obituarist, determined to wring all she could out of the last few minutes of her working morning, dumped her piddly locavore search engine and invoked the cosmic crawling power of her old pal Google to flesh out the picture.

  “Evie, over here.” Audrée from the news desk had snagged their favourite table in the staff cafeteria, the one right beside the microwave. While Evie unwrapped her sandwich, Audrée was lining up her plastic containers matrioshka style, as usual. She popped their lids and then inserted them one by one to be heated in a declension of courses from hors d’oeuvres through to dessert. Evie waited till Audrée had completed the ritualized emptying of her lunch bag before she started in.

  “You’ll never believe it. I had dealings with someone famous who’s not dead. Or dying even.”

  “Ooh, that’s a change for you, Our Lady of the Corpse. Who was it?”

  “Three guesses.”

  “Evie, have mercy. I came straight here from a two-hour meeting with your bossman Aaron. I’m in no mood for games after that. I just want to shoot myself. Unless you want me to end up being the next death notice you’re assigned to write up, you better tell me. Who?”

  “Well, normally I wouldn’t let you off the hook that easy, but seeing as how you were with Aaron, I’ll cut you a break. But you owe me one.”

  “Fine, fine, whatever you say. So spill, who did you meet?”

  “None other than the playwright Jean-Gabriel Médéry, if you please.”

  This would be a first for Evie. It was nearly impossible to surprise Audrée who could scoop anyone in the building with her hands tied behind her back. Her sources were impeccable, devoted, and they were early risers. Somehow, though, Evie’s announcement backfired, and the surprise was all on her side of the table.

  “That shmuck royale. How did you get roped into meeting him?”

  “He lives downstairs in my building. And may I correct you? He’s actually a really nice guy.”

  “Evie, you are pathetic. Just because a guy earns his living with a pen, it doesn’t exonerate him if he committed crimes against humanity. Well maybe it does for you. You’re a special case. But it shouldn’t. The way he humiliated his wife by giving that play her name. He stripped her bare on stage. The whole world knew the intimacy of their marriage, all their private angst. She was so much younger than he was, so innocent. She trusted the bum. And now you’re trusting him. That’s what these guys do with younger women. It’s pathological.”

  “Look, I’m just giving him the benefit of the doubt. I do know him personally after all. I’m sure he made the whole storyline up.”

  “It wasn’t fiction, Evie. It was the truth. He abused his relationship with that child-wife of his to squeeze out material for a play when he hit a dry spell. I don’t know how she was able to show her face in public after that. It was pretty graphic.”

  “And how is it that you know so much, smarty? I’m the one who’s been researching him all morning. Nothing that sordid came up in anything I looked at.”

  “Makes sense to me. That angle wouldn’t have been reported in the mainstream sources. And the Internet barely existed back then, as far as smut mongering went anyway. In those horse and buggy days, if a big name shoplifted or took drugs or hung out in men’s rooms, it all ran more underground. It wasn’t in your face like it is today. Your friend M. Médéry was lucky enough to have slipped in his indiscretions before the cut-off.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. If it was all so secretive, how do you happen to be such an expert on all of it?”

  “I read the tabloids at the time, chérie. You were still a kid.”

  “And this is what you’re basing your opinion on? The supermarket checkout?”

  “It was common knowledge, Evie. You would have had to be brain-dead to miss it. I’m telling you, it’s like knowing about gravity. A fact. Arrogant prick. And to think he raked in the bucks with that play. There’s no justice in the world.” Her upper lip curled back as if the spring roll she’d just chomped into had gone mouldy.

  “I don’t care. I refuse to judge him by what other people say, only by how he behaves towards me, and to me he’s great.” Evie couldn’t help but champion her neighbour. This was her typical stance. Once you had the good fortune to be sucked up into Evie’s orbit, her backing was absolute. You benefited from her full protection in a till-death-do-us-part relationship. With her proclivities she could have temped as a presidential bodyguard.

  “You’ve got it wrong, I’m telling you,” Evie continued. “The Jean-Gabriel I met could never have dragged anyone through the mud like that, least of all his own wife. He’s simply not capable of it.”

  “You’ve know him for what? Two days? And you’re already prepared to vouch for his character? Evie, listen to yourself.”

  “The length of time doesn’t matter. His voice was sincere.”

  “His voice.” Audrée’s tone was flat with disbelief at the extent of her younger friend’s credulousness.

  “You know what I mean. His demeanour. He was very up front. Very open.” Evie did experience a minor twinge while conducting this defence of her dinner guest considering that he had chosen to conceal his true identity from the Anti-Shabbosites, but she decided that he was entitled to his privacy.

  Audrée stuck her arms out to her sides Nixon-style. “I’m not a shmuck, I’m not a shmuck.”

  “Enough. Enough already. I give up. If I can’t change your mind, maybe he can. I invited him back to join us this Friday night. You’re welcome to come over and meet him if you want.”

  “No thanks. That’s a pleasure I can easily do without. Trust me on this one, Granny. You don’t go ahead and invite the wolf into your house. That’s not how the game is played.”

  In a rerun of the previous week, Jean-Gabriel showed up after all the others and with his hands full. He’d cooked for the occasion. He passed Evie a foil pan whose mashed contents seemed to have carroty antecedents. “I made it as empty of ingredients as I could,” he said. “I figured I couldn’t lose that way. But just in case it doesn’t meet your stringent standards, I brought this to pick up the slack.” He held out a bottle of Bordeaux of a vintage that seldom washed down their budget-conscious meals. While his hostess struggled to find an opening on the gridlocked table, Jean-Gabriel joined the others in the living room where Moshe was pouring apéros. Was it his imagination or had the chatter halted with his arrival? Maybe he’d only broken bread with his younger neighbours once but he felt that he’d accurately taken their measure. If you expected to get a word in with this crowd, you had to spot your chink from across the ice and go for it. Any lulls
in their rapid-fire conversations were rare, and a four-beat rest like this one probably stood unrecorded in the annals of the group.

  Evie’s guest’s discomfiture was her own doing, though wholly unintended, an infelicitous by-product of her loquaciousness. It happened to her sometimes. Secrets she’d had every intention of safeguarding just cut loose in public like an impudent fart. All she could do on those occasions was hope that everyone who heard it would do her the courtesy of ignoring it and move on. This wasn’t her night.

  Before Jean-Gabriel arrived fashionably late, her regulars had trickled in with their platters and salad bowls. As usual, they headed directly to the dining room to unload them along with their weekly accumulation of gripes and gossip. Caught up in the slipstream of all their disclosures, Evie blurted out the hidden identity of their co-lodger. And once she’d gone and blown his cover, there didn’t seem to be much point in holding back on the gory details, so she passed along the dirt she’d picked up from the rumour mill at the newspaper. All of them had heard of Jean-Gabriel Médéry. His name was inscribed on the peewee scroll of Quebecers who’d made it big in the outside world, though he ranked considerably lower on the fandom scale than Céline or Rocket Richard. Still, JGM, as he was known compactly in the province, was a heavyweight. Ph.D. candidates were already busy complexifying his oeuvre to satisfy the exigencies of their dissertation advisors, and translators were reworking his jangly Québécois into Georgian and Cantonese.

  The revelations had her friends buzzing. The guy must have royalties pouring in up the wazoo, so what was he doing living in the merest pupik of an apartment? They ran the numbers. His budget had to be loft-worthy. He could easily afford the type of lavish accommodations in the Plateau or Old Montreal that they all coveted. And the wife. Now that was an interesting wrinkle. None of them had seen any evidence of one. If she was an ex, maybe she was soaking him but good. That explanation had several backers as it tidily tied up the loose ends. But she could just as well have been dead. Or maybe he kept her locked up somewhere à la Mr. Rochester if even half the hearsay were true. It was all just too juicy but they would never be able to ask him outright. The deference that they failed to show to their parents came out in their treatment of others of that generation. They were well brought up, all in all.

  Jean-Gabriel sniffed the texture of the silence. It bore the familiar orchid scent of his wife’s perfume. For all that his works had been jury prized, anthologized, and canonized, it all boiled down to one subject when a new crowd latched onto his name. Amélie.

  The Friday night habitués and Jean-Gabriel regarded each other, gossips and gossipee too close for comfort. On the youthful side of the room, no one looked prepared to dispel the hush. It wasn’t that Evie’s company was unwilling, but they were untrained in the specialized shake-up skills an impasse of this degree of delicacy demanded. JGM on the other hand, by virtue of his age and profession, was possessed of the appropriate bag of tricks. Turning a room around was for him old hat so he cranked himself into gear, accepting the responsibility that had parachuted itself into his lap. He bowed deeply to his audience, a swashbuckling reverence. The breeze from his invisible cape was strong enough to ruffle their hair. Jean-Gabriel was pleased with the quality of his dip. Lately his sacroiliac resented sudden flourishes. When he drew himself back up, he seemed to have grown several inches before their very eyes.

  “Allow me to introduce myself. Monsieur Amélie Médéry à votre service.” He spaced the words out for maximal punch. Decades had passed since his acting days, decades since he discovered that his true talent lay behind the scenes, but he hadn’t lost his timing. His accomplished delivery ventilated Evie’s flat, allowing the easy atmosphere of the previous Friday night to reassert itself. The elephant was still in the room, no mistake, but he’d decided to take a brief nap on the cushion in the corner. No one so much as broached the very topic that was on all of their minds until they were digesting over tea and dessert.

  “I saw the play on TV one night when I was babysitting,” said Dizzy. “On Radio-Canada, I think. It would have been in the late nineties I figure. Does that sound right?”

  “Oui, that production wasn’t half bad, with Guylaine Leblanc as Amélie.”

  “What was your wife’s name, if I’m not being too nosy.” Dizzy asked him.

  “Amélie.”

  “No, her real name I mean.”

  “Amélie. I liked the resonance and she was flattered by the homage.”

  “She was quite young when you married, wasn’t she?” Evie asked in what she hoped came off as an unassuming way. “Weren’t you already in your forties?” At work during the past week, on days when the deaths spaced themselves out accommodatingly, Evie profited from the downtime to do some extra-curricular fact checking. She was trying to calculate the couple’s creepy factor. Josh had taught her the formula. He was a whiz on pop culture benchmarks. Half the man’s age (presuming he was older) plus seven. That sum represented the cut-off beneath which any self-respecting male dare not descend. In olden days, before they’d mathematized the expression, it used to be called robbing the cradle. By Evie’s calculations, the Médéry couple was in creepy territory in hip boots. When they married, Jean-Gabriel told them, not vexed in the least by Evie’s inquiry, he was forty-eight, Amélie barely seventeen.

  “To meet her, though, you never would have guessed she was seventeen.”

  Here they all leaned in over the table, expecting some amplification. They weren’t prurient by nature, but when a complimentary x-rated movie came with the motel room, who ever said no? Seventeen was a Lolita-ish number, a number not long out of its training bra, a number that when faced off against the number forty-eight thrummed with possibilities, but JGM’s inner thespian, roused from hibernation by his earlier impromptu performance in the living room, cut short the curtain calls and left the house wanting more. That’s the way it was done.

  And Evie did want more. It wasn’t that she disapproved of Jean-Gabriel’s May-December affaire de coeur, or February-December more like; she wasn’t a prude, but she was curious, yes. Here she finally held captive at her own table a living breathing writer after her many fruitless years on the prowl for such a creature, and just when things were getting educational, he turned off the tap. So much for her entrée into the inner world of the artsy type. In her younger days, Evie’s author reveries used to zero in on the writerly process, the creator locked in holy communion with his typewriter; a full steam ahead qwerty blitz from page one to the finish, but meeting Jean-Gabriel had loosened up the blinkers of her fantasies. Now her mind tinkered with altered scenarios knowing that even the busiest of authorial hands still found plenty of free time to venture away from the keyboard into messier, fleshier terrain than the word. This was the terrain she was suddenly eager to plumb.

  Dany didn’t pick up that the conversational trajectory had taken a veer. He’d been focusing all his attention on the rugelach. They really were very good. Evie’s best yet. Last time she made them she’d been too chintzy with the chocolate filling but these were pleasantly plump. Only after he’d chased down every last crumb with his thumb did he lift his head from his plate and tune back in. He decided to thank his hostess for her pastry efforts by plucking out the question that was foremost on her mind and asking it on her behalf. It would be his bread and butter gift for the night. He turned to Jean-Gabriel who was deeply immersed in a discussion with ManU over the condo board’s deranged decision to renew their shiftless snow removal contractor, Invisible Silvano.

  “So your play Amélie. I was wondering,” Dany interrupted. “There’s a lot of hearsay floating around about its roots, let’s say. You get where I’m headed. Whether it really is a work of fiction like you claimed it to be when it was staged at first. Or not. The story goes that you lifted it from your own life.”

  Evie showed no appreciation that Dany had expropriated her private musings and hung them out on the li
ne, stomping on his foot under the table for his loutish presumption. But Jean-Gabriel looked serene.

  “Sure I lifted it,” he said. “Let’s face it. I have no imagination.”

  The table hooted at his ironic confession. They all knew his shoulder dipped like Brezhnev’s under the weight of all the medals that recognized his literary sleight of hand; the GG, the Order of Canada, the prix de this and the prix de that. Tarted up in formal attire he could match the Queen troy ounce for troy ounce.

  The verdict was in. The Anti-Shabbosites came to the conclusion that their downstairs neighbour was an allrightnik. They let drop their Tribal body armour and welcomed him unreservedly into their gang.

  Chapter 3

  “DID YOU READ THE LABELS?” Marilyn asked.

  “Yeah, Mum. Don’t you think I’ve figured out how to check the ingredients by now? No nuts. Trust me.” Evie handed over the packaged goodies she’d brought and Marilyn accepted them with the tips of her fingers. Her mother whisked them off to the kitchen to scrutinize the fine print as if a rogue cashew in Evie’s trail mix could put the family at risk of anaphylactic shock. Even though the proscription against nuts in her household was strictly pro forma, the Troy matriarch had developed EpiPen reflexes over the years.

  Her father’s welcome was less managerial. “Hi Evie doll.” His smack on the cheek was wet and warm as usual and Evie returned it in kind.

  “Come on down to the rec room. We’re just setting everything up. Joshie’s here already.”

  It was the one night of the year they still gathered round the table, albeit a coffee table, in what passed for familial harmony. The Oscars drew the Troys, movie buffs all, out of their respective corners where every other event on the calendar fizzled. Anniversaries and birthdays couldn’t manage to lure the kids back to the homestead, and as for the Jewish holidays, even a John Deere didn’t have that level of tow-power. The Academy Awards alone could tempt Evie and Josh to fritter away an entire evening under the parental roof. It didn’t hurt that Jake and Marilyn had invested in a sumo TV to sweeten the pot, under no illusions as to the night’s main attraction.