Juliet Was a Surprise

by Gaston Bill

He got the singsong too. I was instantly jealous.

  THE REAL EXPLANATION? The roots of a beautiful seventy-foot deodara cedar grew for more than half a century until they breached the sewer line of the Prudhommes’ house. The tree was there first, but it rarely has rights in these things.

  I was excited by their call because they’d responded to the “arborist” side of the ad I leave thumbtacked on message boards throughout the city, not the “lawn and garden care” side. Mostly, yes, I cut grass and rake leaves. Almost exclusively, in fact. Yardwork is fine; there is mulching to consider, and the tines of one’s rake need thought. But it is to trees that I apply my art, and vision.

  Because, a tree. In the presence of an unfamiliar, beautiful tree—and they are all beautiful—for some moments I am unable to speak while I make my examination. I know that what I do might look like fondling, but I need to hold and to stroke, to feel most of all the bark against my cheek and, yes, my throat. Texture is how a tree communicates! I know some find me odd, I know it costs me work. Anyway. That day, answering the Prudhommes’ call, I was excited that they lived not in a wealthy part of town but on a street of modest bungalows. Rich people use arborists all the time, if only to be able to say, at the club, “My arborist says,” just like their caterer or their pool-boy says. So I was heartened that regular people had called an arborist. Perhaps it signalled a trend.

  I was shown the problem tree. Juliet stood by while I circumambulated her deodara, then went in for my initial brush with fingertips, and inner wrists. Deo was abrasive but patient. I stepped back, I gazed up. Her trunk bent four times on its journey skyward, each time with the jauntiness of a cocked hip. This cedar expressed her female essence not unlike a geisha in traditional pose: hips tilted one way, head tilted another; face down, demure; arms at dramatic angles, holding fans. Exactly that, but with twelve arms and coniferous fans. A tree confident but quiet about her beauty.

  Watching me, Juliet joked, “Now I know what a treehugger is.”

  I couldn’t look at her. “The plumber, he’s sure it’s this—? That damaged the—?”

  “They stuck a camera down the toilet. It’s too bad. It’s my favourite tree.”

  I took another step back, another gaze up. To me all trees are equal, but this tree’s gestures were on the obvious side and I could see why someone might favour it. A breeze came up, and Deo looked pleased with her many small movements.

  “Shame it has to come down,” said Juliet.

  “Down?” My hand, I saw, had grabbed a low branch. I regained composure, cleared my throat. I explained to her my plans, then I picked up my shovel.

  WHEN JULIET TOLD ME her husband taught English at a community college I was surprised. Troy Prudhomme had a habit of punchy speaking, not unPalinesque. He eventually did come outside and, watching me dig the hole, reached in to remove a loose stone that kept getting in the way of my shovel.

  “Well lemme just grab that outta there for ya.”

  When I got near the choked and broken sewer line, as evidenced by a rising tang, he laughed and said, “Hey! Welcome to our shit!”

  Prudhomme seemed wary of proper speech, and I wondered what he was afraid of. Perhaps being accused of liking poetry. He was de rigueur four days unshaven. The arms protruding from his T-shirt were thicker than needed to teach college English.

  As I dug to Deo’s rampaging roots, Troy answered his cell and with a friend discussed plans for the evening: “Well, we snag some beers and watch the ’Nucks lose. You pick the place.”

  Hearing those words, Juliet, fanless but hip-cocked, caught my eye and nodded frantically, minutely. Her eyes had a soulmate’s shine and depth as they yelled to me, Tonight! At last! At last! I’d been there all of twenty minutes. Less than that. I hadn’t said a word to her. I am an average-looking man. Not even. Can I be blamed for anything?

  In any case, I’d made a big hole. I’d reached the spot where root met pipe.

  “Here we are,” I said softly, stepping back.

  Troy inclined his head as if to peer over a rim but kept talking into his phone about the ’Nucks and which players might play. He glanced at me, appeared to recall why I was there and turned to go inside. Juliet followed but spun round at the door and mouthed, ferociously, “Ten after seven.”

  And then, good God, she pointed. Not at me. Not at the ground beneath her feet. No, she pointed at herself. Below the belt. She pointed at the prize, while announcing the time it could be claimed. I’d never seen a human do that. I understand now that it is something an animal might do, if it had fingers, and could tell time.

  To explain: my Juliet was pure.

  I’VE BEEN IN DEEP FOREST and returned to the same spot after the trees were clear-cut. There is something, one thing, good about a clear-cut. It’s there in the word. When all the trees are down, suddenly there is clarity. Sky. I don’t know why a sudden sky is a good thing; why a revelation of distance, of clear space, is better than the dark complexity of a forest. Standing in a clear-cut is sad but it also feels like relief of a sort. Maybe it’s because a natural riot of plants is so difficult. It’s all branches and tendrils and thirst and an urge that can and will break through concrete. Who can walk a wild forest and not feel the threat of an unfathomable presence that parades as stillness? Plus, plants ultimately don’t care about us. In the end, basic rock and sky is simpler to deal with, if we need to get spiritual about this, which I think we do.

  The point I’m trying to make is, what we automatically think of as bad—for instance, a clear-cut—might actually be good.

  I suffered such thoughts when I got home and stood under the shower. To put it plainly, I’d never been bad. Never. Not in that way. Of course I’d harboured the fantasies of any man whose job takes him from house to house, some of which, even in these times, contain lonely women. But I’d never taken advantage. To tell the truth, I’d never had the chance.

  Was it wrong to have the chance? If I were to visit Juliet at ten after seven, was it any more evil than a tree letting a breeze take its pollen? Were wild oats sinful?

  Let me come out with it: I might, technically, have been a virgin. (Oh, I know it’s a comic cliché, the older virgin, but there are more of us than you might think. In this war of appearance, many never do prevail.) Of my sparse adolescent fumblings, one involved alcohol and a cousin and seed was spilled, but I’m not sure exactly where or if it counted. If Anyone’s counting, that is. And if no One’s counting, can there be sin? It was a long and fundamental shower I was taking.

  Juliet was beautiful beyond my dreams for myself, and such women are naturally out of bounds. I had decided not to go, yet I found myself showering purposefully, double-soaping crevices. I shaved a suspicious second time that day, then found myself eyeing my modest row of clean shirts, all tending to shades of brown.

  I pitied my face in the mirror. More than once I’ve been called a hobbit, the attitude of the speaker being that I shouldn’t be insulted by it. This was maybe my only chance. Can it even be right to never do wrong? Can light exist without dark?

  It was time for my root to break pipe, as it were.

  AT A QUARTER PAST SEVEN I strode up the drive, taking note of the missing Troy-car. I feigned confidence by pretending to be here not for Juliet but for the offending deodara cedar. I positioned myself over the hole and, breathing shallowly, because it did smell of sewage, gazed in for a meditation on roots. There they were, exposed in all their bulbous, knuckled glory. In two places, root fist had crushed ceramic neck of sewer line, during a fight utterly dark and slow. A bigger root moved under the pipe, missing it. It could stay. But these two would have to go. The tree would be injured. Half of Deo might yellow and die, but she could be trimmed, shaped. I had told the Prudhommes my plan. A half tree can be lovely. One can mould its weakness not unlike a bonsai. Giant art. Hunchbacked, leaning, it would still be beautiful. How could it not?

  I stood at the hole. The door opened and didn’t close, and Juliet came up quietly.

>   “Troy,” she said, shyly pressing a shoulder into mine, “wants it taken down.”

  “He wants it taken down,” I repeated, to make sure I’d heard right.

  Here in this rainy, verdant city, the popular way with any problem was the chainsaw. No one wanted the care involved in nursing a tree back to health. Cut it down, dig out the hole, stick an expensive foreign sapling in.

  “I’ll—I’ll do all the follow-up. The shaping. For free. Everything.”

  “He wants it gone. He already phoned somebody. He didn’t like you.”

  “That’s—nothing but a shame,” I said, meaning it, forgetting for a moment why I was here. “What do you think?”

  “I think we should go inside. I mean, it smells great and everything, but …”

  I find not unsexy those women who own up to their own dirt, as it were. Not throw it crassly in your face, but smile in admitting they do indeed poop. And the poop goes down that pipe and onward to the sea, there to fertilize languid seaweed that sways, unseen.

  I DON’T KNOW IF JULIET was like this only with me. Maybe she’d seen the way I touched Deo? And wanted some of that for herself? The thing is, she asked me to brush her hair. All of it, everywhere.

  Juliet Prudhomme shaved nothing on her body. Her hair was a tawny-blonde and there wasn’t that much of it. The hair on her legs was the same as on her forearms, in that you had to concentrate even to see it. In her armpits nested two cute tufts. I sensed the depth of her strangeness only when she undid the piled hair on her head and it cascaded down her back, uncut, certainly, for years and years. I could hardly breathe, let alone hold a brush, but I did what she asked. I brushed, shaking all the while, hoping she’d take my hand’s tremor to be a little extra something I brought to my erotic art.

  There in her bedroom, husband Troy at some bar, Juliet sat on the edge of her bed and I knelt, in only my boxer shorts, brushing her long, beautiful hair. She’d lift an arm and I’d draw the brush, once, twice, through her pit, the tines softly tugging through. When I did her legs she parted her knees so I could reach the insides of her thighs, and I encountered the vision I was born to behold. There, eye level, was the crux of my adventure and the spot at which she’d pointed. Edging out past a hem of pearl silk underwear was her humble rim of vulva, mounding demurely, in the sense that it couldn’t help but mound. It too was graced with a fine, squirrel-blonde hair, also awaiting my brush. I could not think and my breathing was ragged. I don’t know why, as I have limited experience in these matters, but her fine hair—its slight lustre, the arc of its uniform wave— suggested the essence, the soul, of Juliet. It was both how and what she communicated. I saw this and believed it as much as I would have the main thrust of a philosophy, had I one.

  I’ll say nothing more. I’ve described enough. Goodness knows I’ve described the brushing, and what followed, over and over in my head. As I review this cycle of images it’s like I’m strapped to a paddlewheel: I’m plunged under and come up drenched and choking but I can’t wait to go under again. It’s my private memory and it will last me my lifetime.

  I was like a plant responding irresistibly to the sun, but at human speed. Picture, if you must, a gnomish man embracing utter beauty, clenching it with hands, legs, wrists, mouth—and leave it at that. Because the embrace, the fecund exchange, did take place. Twice, at my eager plea. After the second time, Juliet told me to be still as she listened carefully to the radio she’d brought into the bedroom so she could hear how much time was left in the hockey game. It would be over in ten minutes.

  So she turned to me as I lay smug (I’m thinking now) on my pillow, and said something.

  In our short time together she’d said other things too, of course. Before, during and after our embraces. She said I was “sweet,” and several times called me “sweetie.” After I’d performed a certain little something with my fingertips, moving them on her bum-skin as on the breakable membrane of a mushroom, she told me, “You’re great at that.” Once she pressed my nose with her thumb, one of her little surprises that kept me reeling, that dug an instant hole under me and made me fall even further in love.

  In love. There it is. In my life I have had almost no chance to give myself like that. To give my body. To bloom, as we were meant to. I have this body in order for it to bloom. Juliet!

  Then she said that final thing. After checking her clock radio, then meeting my eye as inconsequentially as she would a passerby’s on a rush-hour sidewalk:

  “So that was all great, but now you have to get out. Don’t ever come back.”

  I watched Juliet’s face for a smile. None came. It wasn’t humour.

  THE NEXT MORNING I sat rooted in shock. After getting home I’d actually fallen asleep and slept fully. A drained husk, as it were. I woke with the birds and felt replenished, richly spunky again. Potent with confusion. I couldn’t get her words out of my head. I counted them all, many times. The woman I loved had uttered either seventy-six or seventy-seven words to me, including the urgently mouthed “Ten after seven” at her front door. I did not count her pointing finger, her inconceivable jab at herself. How many words did that signal represent? How many theories? Books of philosophy?

  I can explain that I wasn’t seeing clearly. I felt bewildered— and now I see the perfection of that word. Lost in the wild! I cried and it made me feel better. Crying gave rise to all the possibilities, and their logic dried my tears. I saw that she might be in love with me too, and said what she had to say, painful as it was for her. Or, it could be that Troy was murderously jealous, and she said it to save my life, even while ruining hers.

  I stood under a hopeful shower again. But whatever my thoughts, however they swirled, stroked or hit each other, I wasn’t seeing clearly. How could I? And that’s why what happened, happened.

  To say that I almost didn’t return to the Prudhommes’, to my job with the deodara cedar, would be a lie. I am an arborist. In other words, I had two precious reasons to return, even if, that morning, they felt like one.

  LIKE ALL OUTDOOR tradesmen constrained by noise bylaws, I could arrive at my jobsite no earlier than five to nine. Troy had been busy on the phone, it seemed, because here was my competition climbing out of his bigger shiny white truck, “Petersen’s Tree Service” in black Times Roman on the door, all the charm of a tax form. Under that, Forty years in business. I often saw Petersen’s truck around town. It should have read, Forty years destroying your trees without a moment’s thought. Petersen’s monkey-boy sat in the passenger seat gulping coffee. He’d be scaling the tree to do the real work, topping the tree in sections and lowering them by rope to Petersen.

  Petersen sat oiling a chainsaw on the truck’s tailgate. He was big, and he had cut the sleeves from his shirt to reveal his formidable arms. But like many of the smaller species, I puff up when threatened. And perhaps my yellow aviators make me look capable of surprise.

  “What’s up?” I asked, trying at the same time to make my chainsaw look weightless in my hand, which means not letting it tilt me to one side.

  “Not much.” Petersen didn’t even bother looking at me. Which told me that Troy Prudhomme had said something.

  “This is my job here,” I said. “The deodara. Gonna half-root it, heal it.” I dropped the “g” not through fear but as a peace offering.

  “Um, we’re buckin’ it. They called.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Last night.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  He looked at me blankly. I had one good lie ready. Old-growth activists use a tactic called “spiking,” where they drive hidden nails randomly into a random tree. A man wielding a chainsaw can be killed. Spiking just a few trees and making it known can save whole forests.

  “There’s no way they’d call you. It’s been spiked.”

  “No way.”

  I stood slowly nodding.

  “Who the fuck spiked it?”

  “She did. The wife. Juliet. I guess she’s just absolutely in
love with—”

  “She’s the fuckin one called me.”

  “Who called you?”

  “She did. Mrs. Prudhomme.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t fuckin know.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, last night. Six? Said it was an emergency.”

  “Six?”

  I stood staring past him, at Deo, seeing nothing and everything. This last piece of evidence about Juliet did a quick job of flushing all life from me. It’s why I did what I did. It wasn’t rage, per se, it was panic. It was a last-ditch attempt to save my world.

  I yelled a fateful noise, I started my chainsaw. I didn’t nick Petersen—that’s a lie. My blade missed his face by two feet, or maybe one, but in any case he leapt back. Another leap put him in his truck, and I bet he nicked his own face on the way in. He jabbered to his monkey-boy as they sped away, the tailgate open and his chainsaw rattling and walking along its edge. The white truck gleamed in the sun as it turned a corner and was gone. I assume it was Petersen who called the police?

  I don’t remember going to the tree. To Deo, growling machine held in front of me. I do remember starting the cut because of the intense pleasure I took from her pain. And maybe, sure, maybe I was aiming the tree at the house. So in that sense it’s true that I “used the tree as a weapon.” But if you only knew how few trees I’ve taken down in my life—almost none—and how rudimentary my cutting skills are. I have, at best, a sense that a tree might fall north as opposed to south. The question shouldn’t be “did I,” but “could I.”

  I cut. Barely used, my machine roared when unleashed, the teeth of its blade pristine and eager. I breathed smoke as creamyellow chips spewed against my legs and piled on my feet. Oh, the reek of cedar, the gorgeous, shrieking scent of its fresh blood, of its dying. Maybe the smell scraped my eyes, because I found I couldn’t see through the tears. Her death took less than a minute, but in that time I could replay everything.

  It was my Juliet who had called. My Juliet who, after our second embrace, had said to me, in bed, in slumbery amusement, “So, you really love that tree.”