Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  But Ellie here, she’s blessed with a good shnozzola. As soon as she sniffs out that she’s got a flight risk on her hands she dispenses with the preliminaries and jumps him, bang, in her inimitable way. You’re lucky I walked in when I did. Once she has her mitts on you it’s like being humped by a gorilla. Do I have it right so far, Bwana Philippe?

  ELLIE. (To Mose.) Look who’s talking. Passover defines you to a T. We all know that without any leavening powders acting on you, you’d never manage to get it up. I can match you point for point little man.

  ***

  “Evie, you in there?” Moshe was yoo-hooing to her from Jean-Gabriel’s front door. “Hello-o. Evie, that you? Anybody home?” She didn’t respond, but he took the open door as an invitation. She could hear his footsteps padding towards her through the living room. She shouldn’t have left the door wide open after she let herself in, but she’d dreaded being entombed in Jean-Gabriel’s apartment. She figured that with the buzz of the building’s hallway traffic in her ears she’d feel less confined. Wrong choice. Why was it that hindsight never kicked in early enough? She should have picked claustrophobia. If only she’d closed the door and locked it Moshe wouldn’t be about to glimpse the smears goose-stepping across the screen before her. And once he started to read there’d be no going back.

  There was barely time to rectify her bungling, but she had to spare him. She owed him that. Evie clicked to snap the file closed just as Moshe was coming into the bedroom behind her, but Jean-Gabriel’s arthritic computer was slow to comply. She clicked on the X again and again but the overdose of the close command addled the machine. Evie’d flooded it. The file just hung there, its dialogue blaring in the bulked-up font Jean-Gabriel’s clouding eyes had resorted to those last weeks. She fumbled with the monitor button but her fingers were limp. She couldn’t press hard enough to do the job on her first try. Moshe had his hands on the back of her chair and was leaning in to read over her shoulder. As a last resort she closed her eyes and willed herself to vaporize but when she looked down to check on her corporal status she was still sitting in front of the computer, as visible as ever. Moshe hadn’t reacted yet. How could he hold it in? She dared to lift her eyes back up. The screen was blissfully blank. In the endless instant since she’d looked away, Word 1922 had finally managed to sort out her manic multiple messages and given the file the hook.

  “I was worried when I saw the place left open,” he told her.

  “It’s only me straightening things up.”

  “Glad I don’t have to wrestle with a burglar. I wasn’t really prepared for that. Boy, when you clean up a place you don’t fool around. Even neatening up the desktop. Anything interesting?”

  “No, just junk.”

  “Need any help?”

  “I’m fine thanks. Be done in a minute. Just leave me here to finish it off so I won’t have to come back.”

  “You know where to find me if you change your mind.” He headed out but Evie called him back.

  “Mosh. Thanks for the offer.”

  “No problemo. Don’t work yourself too hard, now.”

  She didn’t have to. It was open and shut. Jean-Gabriel had learned his lesson well since he’d fouled his own nest with Amélie. After that, when his gimpy imagination needed a crutch he foraged further afield for inspiration, preying on acquaintances of the disposable type with which he was so richly endowed, individuals whose exact relationship to him couldn’t be as easily pinned down. He didn’t risk offending anyone of significance with his new approach, just the poor sods who recognized themselves on stage. Their humiliation was internal, their rejection private. He’d landed on a fail-safe system. Chew them up, spit them out, move on to the next lot.

  Evie strained to contort the evidence in an effort to give her friend his due. It was her habit of a lifetime. This time she couldn’t make it work. Jean-Gabriel would simply have called his practice fictionalizing, but Evie wasn’t sucked in by the innocuous sound of that word. In her mind, the playwright’s technique was right up there with euthanasia; it sounded right-minded unless you were the one whose face was on the wrong side of the pillow.

  She pilloried herself instead of the proper victim. She’d been too arrogant to accept the warnings of her mother and Audrée. Oh no, she knew better. Her gut instincts were infallible. Who did they think they were to knock her judgment? Evie’d forged ahead despite them and welcomed the snake into her own home for God’s sake, welcomed him with open arms, delivered her friends up to him like some Shabbos pimp, the easier for him to defile them. But her, her he’d singled out for special attention. In heartfelt recognition of her boundless naïveté, stupidité, and honnêteté, Jean-Gabriel nobbled Evie for an extra credit assignment. Of course she’d have to carry it out unsupervised as he’d be inconveniently dead, but she’d follow it through to the end. She was such a straight-arrow, Evie. He had her pegged. She’d never tear up the cheque and walk away. He’d trusted her and in exchange she’d slog her way through the slime of his posthumous commission somehow. If only she could forget what she’d seen while she was scrambling to close the file and her eyes skipped ahead to the list of possible titles. She’d just had time to absorb the first one in the column, the one with the two red asterisks. It would stick in her craw forever. The Village Idiots’ Buffet.

  Chapter 11

  SO WHAT DID AARON WANT WITH HER after all this time? According to the voice-mail he’d left her while she was at lunch, she was being summoned to the boss’s office to discuss the Médéry file. There was a file? It was news to her. Normally Aaron wasn’t one to rehash, let alone months later. Why disinter and dismember previous prose? It was an abomination. Besides, even if he had suddenly found syntactical fault with the paper’s sendoff of Jean-Gabriel, Evie hadn’t been involved in the end product, as he was well aware. Despite all her prep work, JGM was too big a fish to toss into Evie’s skillet for a simple garnish of butter and parsley, so at the last minute Aaron flipped the playwright over to one of his maître-sauciers for a more lavish final treatment. A good thing, probably. For once Evie was grateful that all-stars didn’t fall into her hands.

  Before heading over to Aaron’s office, she gave her colleague’s write-up a professional once-over. In fairness, it covered all the bases without descending into hagiography. Quebecers liked their defunct heroes a bit raggedy, and the text duly portrayed Jean-Gabriel with his halo chipped.

  Her editor was leaning against the doorframe, waiting. He pointed Evie towards the single guest chair with a gracious gesture that his tongue didn’t know how to match. “Park your butt.” Evie balanced herself on the edge of the seat. “Coffee?” He poured some for them both from the insulated carafe beside him. Only once Evie witnessed him drinking from his own cup did she dare to drink from hers. You couldn’t be too careful. The head of the graveyard shift was making an effort; politeness to him didn’t come easy having been raised by wolves. His obsequiousness threw her off balance. If she hadn’t reread the union contract the week before, she would have sworn he was gearing up to give her the boot. Aaron passed her a vending machine danish on a scrap of brown paper towel and leaned comfortably forward as if he routinely invited the peons in for a chummy kaffeeklatsch.

  “I solved a little mystery for myself today and I’m feeling pretty good about it.” Evie dismissed out of hand the possibility that he’d finally cracked the classic walking-while-chewing-gum conundrum. The office odds on that one were too long. She waited patiently to let the twerp have his big reveal, if that’s what his little mind was set on.

  “Remember a while back when I emailed you Jean-Gabriel Médéry’s name as a dead duck and you double checked with me on it?” Evie nodded her recollection. “I wondered at the time why you were so curious about him. You’d never second-guessed me on anybody before, let alone an old fart. Why that old fart, I asked myself. It’s not like he wasn’t due to check out. I mean the guy was up there. Well now
, out of the blue, I have my answer. A little bird told me this morning that you knew him. Not knew of, but actually knew him, on a personal basis.” He could barely squelch his excitement.

  “That’s right,” Evie said. She’d already decided on her strategy. She’d keep her responses to the minimum. Why pay out enough rope for him to hang her with? For surely, though she couldn’t fully grasp why, a scaffold with her name on it was hiding behind his coat cabinet. She resolved to bite off her replies while they were still exiting her lips, locking the gate on the full story. The problem with this approach was that Evie’s open personality didn’t take well to conversational pauses. She always felt obliged to fill in awkward silences. Such was her character. Like nature she abhorred a vacuum.

  “We were friends,” she added. With her artless description of her status vis-à-vis Jean-Gabriel, Evie felt Aaron’s eyes making the rounds of her body in a reappraising way, one that made her crave a proximate fig tree. It was obvious their definitions of the term friend didn’t jibe. She had no alternative but to clarify, hoping to shift his mind from the Lotharian sense of the word that he’d fished out of his remaindered dictionary.

  “Neighbours,” she fed him. Aaron digested her revision. For some reason he seemed happier with this chaste reframing of her relationship with the writer.

  “I don’t suppose in the course of your neighbourly acquaintance that you ever had occasion to meet the wife, Amélie?”

  Et voilà. He’d gotten to the point. “No, we never did meet.”

  “Strange, don’t you think? All these years and she’s never opened up. A regular sphinx. No one’s ever been able to get that broad to spill her guts for the record.” Aaron was picturing a better office for himself, one on an upper floor. With a secretary of his own. Maybe one of those ergonomic chairs. And the increased email quota the newspaper allotted to managers, the better to redistribute his porn. His employee’s connection to Amélie Médéry was tenuous, practically non-existent, but that thread was all he had to loop round his waist so she could hoick him out of the death biz where he got no respect.

  “It would be quite a coup for the paper if you could land an interview. A coup for you if you could pull it off. Who knows where it would lead?”

  As if she needed reminding that Amélie shunned all interviews. It was the very fact Evie had cursed her for in the past. But now, with her revisionist perspective, she had nothing but admiration for the woman’s sang-froid. No way on earth would she intrude on Amélie’s privacy on that simian Aaron’s behalf.

  But on second thought, was this meeting some kind of cosmic wake-up call? Evie’d been stalling on the Amélie front, the cheque burning a hole in the GIC where it was parked. She reran in her memory the crystal ball divertissement Aaron had put on for her when she’d questioned the presence of the playwright’s name on his soon-to-succumb list. Now she was viewing his performance with a less jaundiced eye. Evie’s understanding of occult machinations was vague, but supposing Aaron genuinely was a channeler between the spirit world and terra firma. Could it be that Jean-Gabriel was giving her an otherworldly kick-start using her boss as an intermediary? No, she rejected the notion just as quickly as she came up with it. What poltergeist in his right mind would choose to communicate with earthlings using Aaron as the middleman. Talk about scraping the bottom of the psychic barrel. But then again, maybe wherever it was that Jean-Gabriel was consigned you couldn’t pick and choose your emissary. She pictured a Shawshank setup where you go collect your laundered jumpsuit and blankets from the trustee and find a name slipped between the folds in exchange for two packs of Luckies. Evie decided not to obsess over procedural matters. The important thing was that this dispatch from the beyond had successfully played dodge ball with the meteors and the comets and the dead sputniks littering the highways and byways of outer space in order to reach its designated addressee. It was time for her to act.

  On this street the pigeons had the better view. The modest row-house facades were nothing to write home about, refrigerator boxes, samey and symmetrical. But somehow the rooftops hadn’t gotten the memo. They were decked out for Ascot, sporting florid headgear meant to redirect the eye from their flat-chested undercarriage that would never snag a suitor. The rooflines on the east side of the street aped the Middle Ages with enough crenellated castle towers to shield a regiment of archers, while the houses on the opposite side were more eclectic in their roofery, more pacific in their appurtenances, decorated variously with Aladdin’s lamps, funerary urns, and beavers. Number 6738, though, lacked any rooftop puffery, thrown up by a builder armed with no more than a T-square and a deadline.

  To get to the back yard, which was evidently their destination, they passed through a side hallway that gave Evie a clear view of all the rooms on the main floor. Though the owner wasn’t really that much older than she, the décor was all sensible shoes and support hose, everything squared to the corners, nothing out of place. In the hospital kitchen, one plate and its matched mug snoggled in the drainer, their frisky intimacy at odds with the priggish aura of the house. No doubt they’d be reprimanded later by matron.

  But if the house was spinsterish, the garden had flung off its corset, scattering its stays like buckshot into the mulch. No edged plots here; no trace of the manic alignment that blighted the home’s interior. In the secluded yard, a merry anarchy of flora belied its master’s restrained intervention. Amélie and Evie sat down at a tiny wrought iron table shaded by a grape arbour. Their chat lurched along, pausing after each of Evie’s serves that couldn’t seem to get a steady volley going.

  “I’ve never seen such an amazing garden. Sitting here, you’d swear you were in Provence.”

  “That was the plan.”

  “Was there much back here when you moved in?”

  “No. Rien. Just packed earth.”

  “So you created it all from scratch?”

  “Pretty much so.”

  “It must take up a lot of your time, even though it looks so natural.”

  “Yes, but I enjoy making things grow.”

  “Not me. My thumb is so black, I’ve been known to kill a plastic geranium.”

  “Ah oui?”

  The excess of conversational dead air had by now coalesced into a mini-climate that clamped itself onto the postage stamp garden, choking off Evie’s gift for small talkery. Usually she was able to coax the most buttoned-up interlocutor into giving out. It was one of her hostessy skills. But in these peculiarly oppressive conditions, with all her sallies falling to naught, the intervals in between efforts began to stretch uncomfortably long. It must have been the FedEx envelope sitting on the table between them that had her off her game. Even though Evie had sent it herself; even though its presence accounted for her visit, it disconcerted her to see it in these unfamiliar surroundings.

  Amélie came to her rescue. She pulled from the envelope the copy of Jean-Gabriel’s unfinished play that Evie had printed out and set it on the table. Her index finger drummed the text.

  “This Ellie in here, this is you I presume.”

  “It’s me.”

  “And the others? Outside of Philippe I mean. Made up?” Evie shook her head. “My closest friends. They’re more than friends really. They might as well be my family.”

  Silence reigned again, but of a different tenor; a deeper, more contemplative quiet. Amélie passed the pages back and for a second they both clasped them from opposite ends. It amounted to the secret handshake, the proof they were members of a support group of two that met in the same church basement. The realization that they were sisters under the skin freed Amélie to hurdle over several levels of trust that ordinarily would have been the work of months, even years. She plunged in with no preamble.

  “It was the kids, you see.”

  “I don’t follow you, what kids?”

  “The kids I failed to have. If not for that who knows how things would
have ended up between us. Funny, for someone who defied her parents to marry an older man, a bohémien like they called him, my dreams were as traditional as they come. I didn’t want a career for myself. What could I do anyway at that age? A home full of kids. That’s what I wanted. It’s what we both wanted.”

  Evie could easily imagine the barney if at the age of seventeen she had brought home for pre-nuptial inspection a beau who, if you stopped to count his tree rings, was closing in on the mid-century mark, outranking her own father in longevity and paunch. But à la Amélie she would have plugged her ears to their warnings. Such was the way of daughters in love. Parents, however modern they saw themselves, however many generations removed from the old country, never twigged that nowadays these visits were mere formalities. By the time mum and dad were meeting the hoary reprobate who was in any event already shacked up with their daughter, resistance was futile. According to the script, now was the moment for them to negotiate with the alta kocker who’d mesmerized their daughter as to the number of goats they’d contribute to the ménage.

  Amélie went on, “But the babies didn’t come, and they didn’t come and they didn’t come. Who imagines that kind of thing when they’re young? I thought it would be instantaneous. You know, like it is when you don’t want them. Well, it didn’t take long for things to go sour after that. And they soured with a bang as you and the whole world now know.”

  Evie was processing this missing link when Amélie added, “To be fair, it wasn’t just Jean. Neither of us handled it very maturely.”

  “But you weren’t mature,” Evie jumped in, eager to support the overgenerous Amélie with all the firepower at her disposal. “You were hardly out of your teens at the time.” Ever since Evie had unfriended Jean-Gabriel post-mortem, she needed someone else to put in his slot on her tool belt. Otherwise she was off balance. Replacing him with Amélie would restore her equilibrium. She struck Evie as eminently deserving, short acquaintance be damned.