Everyone in the room froze, their eyes fixed on Moshe for a major re-eval. Even Delray put on the brakes halfway down. He sensed that the hands that should have been cupped between his mother’s legs to receive him had petrified, so he’d damn well wait until they came to. He set his arms akimbo and stuck his knees out charleston style for added friction. At Evie’s first post-delivery internal Arlene would feel the skid marks. In the entire battery of factory equipment, only the hinges on Moshe’s jaw were operational, allowing his chin to drop to his belt buckle.
It was Evie who splashed them all with smelling salts to bring them back around to business. She’d started to bellow and heave, the sounds emerging from her throat earthy jungle floor grunts, fallen from the coloratura stratosphere where her earlier cries had been soaring. Her new timbre signalled to those in the know that it was all nearly over and done. Delray felt a swift kick in the tush that sent him barrelling down the rest of the way. So much for calling the shots. Arlene caught him as he erupted from his mother like a champagne cork. He was perfect.
Chapter 19
“I TRIED TO TELL YOU ALL THIS on the phone.” Amélie cranked herself up to regurgitate her position for the umpteenth time. “I do not want the apartment.” She pronounced each word separately and roundly, throwing a lot of mouth into each syllable, as if she were speaking to a rookie lip reader.
“Be that as it may, Madame, it is my duty as M. Médéry’s notary to act on his instructions as laid out in his will, and it was his express wish that you inherit his condo.”
“But what about my wishes? Don’t they count for anything? We’re retreading the same territory here. I already told you, over and over again, I don’t need a second residence, and I have no intention of moving.”
“It’s a nice little starter property. Up and coming neighbourhood. Near all amenities. Some young couple will be glad to take it off your hands.”
Amélie considered switching to English on the woman whose flat r’s pegged her as an Anglo. Sometimes that’s all it took to set a wobbly discussion back on four solid legs, but on second thought she was not really sure that language was the impediment. Her words seemed to be ricocheting off the notary’s invisible flak jacket and splintering into their component letters which then spilled to the floor, puddling in an unintelligible alphabet soup. The notary wasn’t misunderstanding Amélie’s statements so much as willfully refusing to understand. “For the last time Maître,” Amélie said. “I don’t want to have to be put to the trouble of selling the property. I quite simply don’t want anything to do with it.” For the last time was a rash formulation to deploy so early on in the debate, a dead end locution, but this notarial battering ram had her so punch drunk that she let herself be hoodwinked into premature ultimatum.
“We just gave it a fresh coat of paint. The white opens the place up, don’t you think?”
Now she was on to décor? The woman had segued like a Sherman tank over the hillock of Amélie’s objections. For five straight days Amélie’d been under siege from Jean-Gabriel’s notary, a holy warrior, persistent beyond all reason, bombarding her with phone calls at fifteen-minute intervals, robo style. Didn’t she have any other legatees to harass?
To silence her once and for all the resistant heiress agreed to the notary’s proposal that they meet up at Jean-Gabriel’s condo to hash things out mano-a-mano. Amélie’d arrived fully armed with her business demeanor, honed to perfection after years of wheeling and dealing with the suits at head office. In full-blown corporista mode, when Mme. Turcotte stared an opponent down, he always blinked first. But somehow today it wasn’t working. She must have left the ammo for her dart-gun eyes in her desk drawer back at the bank.
Agreeing to abandon her own turf was a colossal strategic blunder. Now she’d left herself defenceless on the Eastern Front, faced off against this bulldog with a briefcase and her spectral sidekick to boot. It would take more than two coats of cheap primer and a lick of paint to obliterate Jean-Gabriel’s traces from the apartment. She could feel his presence bleeding through the latex like mould on the bathroom ceiling. Her breath was starting to come short and shallow in asthmatic chuffs. All she wanted was to get out into the fresh air, but the notary beat her to it.
“Why don’t I step outside for a minute and leave you on your own to look around a bit?”
Amélie was grovellingly grateful for the offer of distance even if it did just postpone the inevitable. Down at the bank, Mme. Turcotte had earned herself a sobriquet, not that anyone who valued his job dared use it to her face, but it was out there and she knew it. Amélie the Great and Powerful. It was a good thing they couldn’t see her now, downgraded to Amélie the Limp and Lily-Livered, wimping out ignobly under the pressure of this hyped-up paper pusher. She’d never get her street cred back. Amélie flipped the deadbolt shut behind her tormentor and locked herself in with whatever tufts of reputation that still clung to her.
Marilyn walked out of Jean-Gabriel’s condo in her dun-coloured blazer that apparently did say notary after all. She hadn’t tricked herself up in a disguise since her Caravan days of yore up on Parliament Hill and she experienced the same flutter today to see that her chosen ensemble had executed its intended flim-flammery. Her performance, on the other hand, she had no choice but to blast as a two thumbs-downer, sashaying between notary and real estate agent like a farblondjet understudy. In her own defence, though, Evie and Moshe had only supplied her with a bare-bones script. She’d wanted extra coaching but she couldn’t press them to rehearse with her more, not as broken up as they were over the impending loss of their son. It would have been too cruel. They were barely hanging on, those two. So Marilyn was left to her own devices, and even if she was no Meryl Streep, she’d still succeeded in delivering Amélie to the apartment, however much her heart rebelled against her assigned task. Her role in this intrigue was played out.
Not a peep in almost twenty years, and suddenly this? Jean-Gabriel in a convent. She shook her head at the cockeyed juxtaposition. Six feet under and that man still had the power to give her a belly laugh. And to confound her. Amélie strolled through the rooms, revelling in the solitude, kicking the tires of his modest little condo. She ran the hot water in the kitchen sink till the pipes banged with the effort and fiddled with the stove knobs to wheedle them into cooperating with the burners. What was he playing at living in this Yugo of an apartment?
Scrimping. That was not Jean’s MO. He’d leapfrogged over the whole struggling young artist stage. Success had found him while his moustache was still patchy on the ground and by the time she met up with him, envelopes bearing royalty cheques were flowing so regularly into his mailbox that they knew his address by heart. And his fame had only enjoyed a growth spurt since their parting, thanks in the main to her. She could still feel the weight of his shoe on her shoulder as he vaulted to new heights with Amélie, her wife-life lacerated in two acts.
Nowadays there was always a theatre marquee around town barking his name for some new production or other. Plummy CBC voices dramatized his plays on the radio waves, l’Opéra de Montréal libretticized them, and Les Grand Ballets Canadiens performed them en pointe. The only twist left was to do them on ice. He was still a cash cow, Jean.
So how had it come to pass that all that income had vaporized, reducing him to living in quarters too diminutive to hold his ego? Mme. Money-Manager stood in the middle of his empty bedroom and assessed what little she had to go on, her pocket abacus clicking. There had to be more to his estate than this runty flat. It was inconceivable that he’d blown all his assets in the years since she’d last seen him. The Jean she knew was generous with money, yes, but loose or careless, jamais. In their brief time together he’d been invited in on more ground floors than she could count, but get-richer schemes never seduced him. From her current financial perch she’d scanned enough portfolios to be able to qualify his investment style as schoolmarmish. He was a bond guy from the word go,
only one rung up the fiduciary ladder from stuffing his savings in a sock. Jean saved his risky behaviour for other domains.
Apropos. Thirsty dependents. Now that was a scenario that could account for shrivelled capital, a just-so story that she’d seen played out time and again behind the closed door of her office. Had Jean spawned some scattered Jeannes and Gabrielles whose mothers had Outremont tastes? She tried that explanation out for size but her gut told her that it wasn’t true. Or maybe she just didn’t want it to be true.
An alternate theory started to hatch in her mind, one that booted her earlier one aside. An inkling it was, no more than that, but clingy. She could just imagine her Jean making some last-ditch philanthropic gesture to buy back his immortal soul, some megadonation that would seize him by the collar and yank him back from the brink à la dernière minute. Not his name on a hospital wing or a university pavilion, no; too posthumously me-me-me. It would have to be one of those children’s causes to put a lock on his salvation, an orphanage in Bosnia, schools in the Sudan, a kiddie eye clinic in Gaza. The more she mulled it over, the more she was convinced that she’d hit on it. Jean had gone the payout route to land himself a cushy writer-in-residence sinecure in the clouds. Had he genuinely believed that Saint Peter wouldn’t spot the black roots of his death-bed largesse and point him ever so politely in the direction of the down escalator?
Ah, what was the point of being shrewish at this stage in the game? Without an audience it lacked its old allure. She took a brief detour into magnanimity. They’d had their share of good times, the two of them. And she was hardly in any position to disparage his choices in life. Once her womb proved inhospitable, the rest of her body took its cue, shutting the doors and drawing the blinds, operating in perpetual penumbra. Their separation saw them each follow a warped path of their own designing.
A clunk from the direction of the living room distracted her from her musings. On top of it came a mewling cry. How had Jean ever been able to concentrate enough in this echo chamber to churn out any pages when you could hear the next door cat howling as clearly as if its litter box were in the adjoining room? Whenever he was holed up in his study on a writing bender, Jean demanded sepulchral silence, outer-galactic silence, cryogenic silence. Back then Amélie had come up with her own personal adjective to describe that capstone of noiselessness; those others just didn’t cut it. Omelette silence was what she called it.
She could still see the mixture. All over the wall. Dribbling down in phlegmy strands. Yellowing the floor. Her favourite bowl in shards. She’d been cracking eggs too emphatically down in the kitchen while he was trying to tie up a tricky scene upstairs. That was her crime. Yet in this place the mitoyen walls were made of tissue paper and the pipes of cannelloni. For all the building’s highfalutin heritage-plaque status Amélie’d seen pizza boxes more sturdily constructed. That the former nunnery was older than the country itself left her cold. Justement, it was probably the structure’s pre-Confederation asbestos wadding that knocked Jean off prematurely. His health had always been robust. In more salubrious lodgings he might have banked a few more years under his belt.
Amélie’s plain-Jane little row house rose up in her mind’s eye. She very nearly hadn’t bothered to go check it out the first time the real estate agent told her of its location; she wasn’t looking to settle in that garden-gnome quartier, thank you very much. He struggled to dredge up some plusses, but the best the desperate realtor could come up with in trying to fix Amélie up with that faux-brick wallflower languishing on his list was that it had a good personality. His matchmaking skills, fumbly though they were, ultimately did succeed in uniting Amélie with 6738 rue de Montressis. Turns out the two were fated for each other. After so many years of steadfast companionship, Amélie would never think of trading in her beloved home that hugged itself around her like a pair of old slippers for Jean’s wimpled flat. His rinky-dink condo, despite the building’s hipster appeal, had nothing on her place, so solid, so true, but she sensed that if ever the two residences were to be introduced, Jean’s would snigger at the blatant uncoolness of hers.
Amélie took umbrage on her home’s behalf. The imagined mockery targeting her cherished little house was all it took to restore her starch. She’d just walk out of here. That’s what she’d do. Enough playing the doormat. Fini. She squared her shoulders, treated the apartment to a firm good-bye, good riddance salute, and turned to leave, but on her way out through the living room she picked up a problem that demanded her attention, however desperate she was to put the place behind her.
On the street-facing wall was a hatch of some kind that she had barely registered before, coal-chute-ish in design, but hinged at the bottom. The utilitarian or religious purpose of such a strangely fashioned opening she could not divine in the few seconds she allotted her mind to toss it about, but what did it matter anyway what its original function was for the good soeurs who’d been cloistered here? All that mattered was that now its door was gaping inwards, angled down nearly parallel with the floor, inviting noise and sidewalk grit to make their way into the apartment unimpeded, not to speak of all those rats and pigeons out there of an exploratory bent. Anyone with a grain of sense would have long since had it sealed shut against the wind. Jean must have been losing it towards the end. Amélie could not make herself leave without dealing with it. It offended her sense of propriety, casting her mind back to her grandpapa Xavier who took to wandering around the house with the trap door hanging open on his union suit after mamie died, no matter who was there. It just wasn’t right. Amélie went over to lift the door closed but when she bent down she saw that the niche that it formed with the wall was occupied.
He stopped squalling the instant she leaned in over him. At least she presumed it was a he. The baby was dressed up toasty warm in blue footsied pyjamas and swaddled for good measure in a hand-knitted grandmotherly blanket. Rebellious wisps of auburn hair sneaked out from under his acorn cap. One week old? Two maybe? A month? She didn’t have enough experience with newborns to tell. In fact a grand total of none. Amélie picked the baby up and docked him on her shoulder to sniff. Did all babies smell of fresh-baked bread, she wondered? The infant nosed her up reciprocally. He was a curious little guy.
Amélie shifted the compact bundle against her chest this way and that, accommodating herself to its centre of gravity which seemed to rest in the diaper region. She cupped her right hand under that spot for extra support and it elicited a plastic-y crinkle. Her other hand, though an amateur of equal standing, somehow knew enough to cradle the head. Her hold on the baby seemed to her secure enough that she was emboldened to embark on a tentative test drive around the tiny apartment. The two of them took a few steps together without mishap so they ventured onwards, hugging the walls to maximize the mileage, moving at a stately pace. On their second lap he fussed a bit. Amélie interrupted their circuit and tried jiggling him up and down but her stiff, sink-plunger motion seemed to agitate him all the more. She panicked when she felt him revving up for takeoff. She had no moves left in her anorexic repertoire. That’s when her hips took charge of the situation. Somebody had to. They commenced to sway from side to side. It was the lazy, sensuous hula of a different build of woman, a woman fleshier of form, with a cushiony belly and pendulous engorged breasts; a woman with her hair unbound. Gauguin might have tucked a gardenia behind her ear. A woman replete. After a few gentle swings back and forth in the hammock of her arms the baby calmed right down.
They resumed their promenade. At the front window they stopped to check out the sky. “What do you think Raphaël mon bébé? Those clouds look pretty dark. It’s starting to turn nasty out. Will you be warm enough in that? Hein, mon amour?” How did her voice know to up itself an octave, resettling in that fluty acoustic range that baby ears so favoured? She kissed his cheek to mark her claim while awaiting his meteorological judgment. “Tell maman Raphaël. I wouldn’t want you to catch cold.” She experimented with a little tickle un
der the chin.
Raphaël studied her. She needed some breaking in, this one. He corkscrewed his lips to relay to her the message that he didn’t give a hoot about the weather. His priority numero uno was to be served, and pronto. This, his first stab at communication with his adoptive mother was embarrassingly rudimentary. Charades he’d stooped to. Lower even on the semantic totem pole than me Tarzan but effective nonetheless.
Amélie took one look at his face and grabbed the raincoat she’d set down on the kitchen counter. Had it only been a half hour before? She bundled the baby up in its folds and the two of them scurried out of the apartment to scare up some formula and a bottle.
A gassy smile illuminated Raphaël’s features. She showed real promise. He’d have her trained up in no time.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my gentle but insightful first readers Joy R. Zaslov and Kendall Wallis. Many thanks also to Len Husband who led me to Inanna, and Luciana Ricciutelli who picked me out of the slush pile once I got there. Julie Barlow, Susan Doherty, Luigina Vileno, and Benoit Léger gave much needed advice along the way.
Above all thank you to Ron who always made me believe that it would happen. I’m grateful for your patience, your rejection buck-ups, and your meals along the way. I’m lucky I found you. Last but not least thanks to my son David, title coach and all-around good boychik.
Photo: Marcie Richstone
Phyllis Rudin has lived in the U.S., France, and Canada. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in numerous Canadian and American literary magazines. She lives in Montreal which serves as the landscape for all her fiction.
Evie, the Baby and the Wife Page 21