Juliet Was a Surprise

by Gaston Bill

  I’d been giving her my thoughts, that seeing a tree was to behold its heartbreaking relationship to the sun. It was like God and supplicant; it was a successful religion. I spouted the usual, the stuff I’m no longer so wild about.

  “You think trees are so special,” she said, six more words I thought she meant.

  “More than that!” I exclaimed, obnoxious. I told her how blind we were to each plant’s uniqueness, and that we should never call them by their species. “If we call that tree an oak, we’ll see an ‘oak,’ not the living process of that single being.”

  “I thought it was a deo … deodo …”

  “I’m using ‘oak’ as an example.”

  “Deodorant!” she said, not listening. She added, “Ironic,” in that singsong of hers, and I suppose she meant her sewer being broken by a deodorant tree. But I was breathless with my theories and growing breathless for another reason too, wanting embrace number three.

  My monstrous chainsaw roared its triumph. The second before Deo leaned, shouting her orgasmic final crack to begin her fall, Troy appeared on the cute little deck that issues from their bedroom. Had I aimed the tree at this bedroom? Who knows. You won’t believe me, but I do think it was the tree’s aim more than mine. Deo had been aiming herself all her life. So had I. So had Juliet, and Troy. It’s why we love trees—we see ourselves in the rooted and the helpless.

  Troy tried to catch Deo. It was so pathetic and hopeful a move that it made me like him. His arms raised to the sky were a cuckold’s arms—that is, a lot like a child’s. Twenty Troys couldn’t have caught that tree’s tons, twenty Troys couldn’t have protected Juliet, who yet again lay languishing post-coitus in her bed, a bed she had shared with exactly one too many.

  I’M TOLD JULIET’S in a coma. Am I sorry?

  Troy, apparently, will walk again. Shoulders heal, as do vertebrae. He’ll wear his facial scars proudly to English class and ’Nucks games. No, I’m not sorry. For I can say that I’m seeing more clearly now. I see, for instance, that Juliet is still in control. No, she’s not faking her coma. She’s not a possum. But I do know she’s an animal, hiding and in wait.

  I can see how I’ve changed. Though it might have come through in my explanation, you’ll be surprised at the new me, especially when you hear me say: Any forest seen from orbit is a carpet of breeding mould. At war with absolutely everything. Trees are shit. Trees, all plants, are shit. They are teased up, tortured up, by the sun. They fight each other for its light, squeezing out what competition they can. Green is envy. Texture is defensive and mean. Do you know how many pretty garden plants exude poison through their roots, and gasses through their leaves, to keep weaker plants small, and in the shadows?

  Do your worst to me. It’s expected.

  I sometimes feel like a mushroom, not just because it eschews the sun. And not because a mushroom is the hobbit of the plant world. Anyone can tell by their shape and colour that they bulb about in a blind and comic hell. Mushrooms are twerps. Some are dangerous. Good.

  I could go on, but no more explanation is needed. Look at me. Now look at Juliet. Even in a hospital bed, Juliet has me beat. Even now she has someone in there tending her hair, as it were.

  Tumpadabump

  Chantal stops the taxi five blocks early, wanting to walk. Actually wanting not to walk, wanting this not to happen at all, this final dispersing of the will. She has not been this far downtown in months and she hates it. She believes she probably always has, the soulless glass towers and banal exhaust fumes. She wants home and its grand stone buildings, each as ripe with odd spirit as a human being; she wants the Seine’s good stink.

  But there is only today. With the doling out of Bill’s assets, maybe he will exist a little less. Maybe this will help clear her head. Dr. Michel said that today’s meeting “might unstick the glue. It might trip up the rhythm.” Those were his words. Also, “Maybe he’ll stop seeking your attention.” Dr. Michel was a bit of a caricature getting her to come here today, excited and gesticulating to shoo her from his office, Go! Go!

  She glances up to the green glass tower, stomach hollowing. Bill’s son, Cameron, will be here. She has met him many times, including Christmas dinner twice. It was not terrible. She would watch him, civil in his upright posture, wrestling intelligently with himself, trying to get on with this Frenchwoman, only ten years older than him, this salope who had displaced his mother. But now here she is getting more money than him, much more, and even to her this feels not right. The condo she is fine with—it is her home. She is also getting the Porsche, which she has not yet driven. But then she is getting the insurance money, which for an accidental death is exactly one million dollars. Cameron gets two hundred and fifty thousand, un peu excessif for a twenty-four-year-old aimless kid, but nothing to replace a father, and not as much as she is getting, which is the point. She who came along and broke up a family, who was married to him a mere three years. And in their country not much longer than that. Cameron’s mother is getting nothing. Bill composed the will and allowed no grey.

  Today Chantal wants to tell him, she wants to say to Cameron that she did not expect this money. She wants to say how much she loved his father. She needs him to believe her grief. Mostly she wants to tell him—yes—how bizarrely Bill died. And explain that an emergency can be endless. That sound can become a parasite.

  She reaches the building. In Paris they would have demonstrated against this green atrocité. Only two people have recognized her on her five-block walk. That quizzical stare— Now, who …?—before they realize she is Metro’s Meteorologist. “In the flesh” is the expression. Her apparently famous cheekbones. Her “European flair,” whatever that is. She suspects it is just her accent. To find flair in imperfect speech is to infantilize, but so be it. She suspects accents are sexy in men because they suggest exotic knowledge, but in women they suggest vulnerability. It took her some months to learn how not to call him Beel. In any case, as Bill cheerfully pointed out, her career onscreen was going to have its superficiality. It does disturb her, being recognized. Though she always smiles back, for her career. She has not given up her dream of serious journalism, of anchoring, despite the bad signals she has had. Bill called these the ghosts of freedom fries.

  She pushes through the tower’s revolving door, a seemingly playful technology that unnerves her, but once through she enjoys the cool, cleaner air (Bill’s “corporate air”) of the atrium, its vast, alert space and the spatter of the gauche fountain. It does clear her head for a moment … then Bill comes back.

  In fact they met here, at that party on the top floor. The concierge at the central desk offers his “Hello, Mrs. Robertson” with a sadly knowing tilt of the head. At first she thought it kind when Bill’s colleagues insisted they take on his probate, assuring her they knew estate law, they were not just entertainment law, God no, they did that only because it was lucrative and, well, entertaining. Bill called it contract law, because that is what it was; they specialized in media, which meant music and films and television. At that party upstairs he said, “Weather Girl, meet Entertainment Lawyer. Nonsense, meet Oxymoron,” even as they shook hands. She did not understand what he had said until later. By then she saw his endless cynicism, and how it was excused by all because he was just as cynical about himself.

  The elevator is empty and Chantal presses the silly 14 that should be 13. At that same party Bill talked her out of becoming a “meteorologist,” the label her station was adopting. Talked her out of it while seducing her at the same time. First he asked if they still said vachement all the time in France. She said not so much as her parents’ generation had, a gentle dig at his age. Too bad, he said. I mean, it means “cow-size.” It’s the best expression I’ve ever heard. It’s vachement fou, non? Then he told her she could not be a meteorologist. Everybody already knows the term is fake. That same stupid weatherman is suddenly a meteorologist? It’s worse for you, he said. It’s an insult. You’re there reading the weather because you’re exactly
the person everybody wants to look at and wants to hear. You’re there because you’re perfect. He said this with a small shrug. Pretending you’re a scientist is demeaning. Insist against it, he said, adding, It’s cow-size stupid. He walked off with both their glasses to get them fresh drinks, assuming she had not had enough of him. She watched Bill go and watched him at the bar, wondering at his odd ugliness and large grace and if maybe he were gay. She found out when he came on to her ten minutes later, right after his twenty-second sketch of a dead marriage played out with his hands as if they were puppets. One of the hands was lying there dead and the other was humping all over it. Bill never smiled once. He did not care what you thought of him. No, that was not it—he would care deeply if you stopped liking him, but it would never make him change anything he said or did. He asked if she wanted to “take in some gourmet air” out on the balcony. When she saw his humble regard for the vista of city lights, which he seemed to find enigmatic and which of course was his only mystical firmament, she thought she could make this man content. And she was partly right. She did fight successfully against becoming a meteorologist for another two years. Her segment stayed, simply, “The Weather, with Chantal.”

  At number 14 she departs the elevator with her heart in her throat and a piano version of a Beatles song tinkling behind her. “Michelle,” their French one. Bill once told her that elevator music was the true white heart of North American culture. She continues to hear too clearly so much of what he said to her.

  And continues to hear him fall down and die.

  SO SHE MUST UNDERSTAND HIM. It is funny that she does not know if he was funny. “Funny” being such a funny word. Maybe he was funny spelled w-e-i-r-d. Maybe she still does not know what funny is over here. Sometimes Bill’s small remark would make everyone laugh except her, or sometimes she was the only one to laugh. Maybe it was a French truc. In fact he often could remind her of a Frenchman. An old, typically clear-headed yet twisted man, a philosopher in the way all old Frenchmen are, islands unto themselves and always right despite the ocean of evidence to the contrary. It is true, his irony could grate. Once he quoted to her, “Irony is the sound of a bird in love with its cage,” an image so self-knowing it made her forgive everything. He was being ironic, of course.

  But he was funny, not just morose, morbid, mordant. Once, soon after their new passions had cooled and la différence had relaxed, when he touched her elbow next to the bed and she told him she was so tired it would be like being with a dead fish, he paused as if considering, and asked, “Dead how long?”

  She needs to understand exactly one thing about him. His jokes—if you could use that word—often appeared to surprise him too. They seemed to take him places, the way one might follow a sudden dark alley. All the while saying, Look at me. This was important too. She almost does not like to think of this. Not a month into their marriage, her cheek pressed to his shoulder, she watched him shaving and said something like, “Mon dieu, to have to shave your face.” At this, he stared harder into the mirror, growing clownishly bug-eyed as if discovering the gravitas of her comment even while scraping through foam. He proceeded to draw his razor in front of his ear, shaving off his entire sideburn as he did, and then still farther up, slow and hard so she could hear the cut bristles, dragging a new path, destroying his haircut and in the end having to shave his entire head. He does not act like a lawyer, she thought at the time; he violates laws of common sense. She wondered about his colleagues, these repressed arbiters of civilization, and came to see that lawyers often acted le roi du flan but were in fact frustrated about something deeply general. Many drank heavily as a controlled hobby. But Bill did not drink like that. He was neither repressed nor civilized. He was certainly not drunk when he died. He did not just fall down drunk.

  She noticed his jealousy of clients. Bill would use the word “artist” facetiously, especially around young musicians. He was easiest to read here, his mockery so plain. Female singers sang “emo-porn,” he said, and tough-voiced guys had their balls in their throat. No, hairy balls in their throat. The good-looking clients were “faces.” (And might not that be me? she wanted to say.) By the time clients could afford his help they were rich, and in his view overnight spoiled brats. If they deigned to meet with him at all he was seen as “the bearer of mysterious numbers” as well as “a boss they could fire.” Once he did get fired when word got back to a singer (a face) that in a meeting Bill had lifted and shaken a laptop while claiming that it could make him sound as good. He detested certain rappers especially, called them pigs, and he hated “doing their arithmetic.” But he liked the theatre people. Chantal thinks she remembers him saying, “They seem to know they’re crazy as babies.”

  But largely his clientele depressed him. Maybe it was because they were doing something creative while he was not. His colourful clients even seemed to make him regret his own name. Bill Robertson, a bland one.

  What matters is the depression. How it fit, how it might fit, with humour. With joking. It is this that she needs to know.

  CHANTAL PAUSES at the grand mahogany door. The corridor is perfectly silent, so his rhythm is insistent. She thinks she hears Cameron’s laugh. It should relieve her, that his son might be at ease with all of this today, but it does not.

  Chantal wants to ask Cameron something but knows she will not dare, because it will sound only horrible and she will not find the best words: How far would your father go to tell a joke? Another thing she will not ask him, less because it might risk the insurance money than because it might hurt him: Do you think he was suicidal? And, If he did kill himself, he would make it funny, wouldn’t he? She can picture Cameron’s face. He would think she was crazy. He would think her even crazier if she asked, Why did he not love me enough to stay?

  Janet, one of the several secretaries, rises and gives her those huge, intimate eyes that were at first a balm to Chantal until she saw how everyone got them and they were Janet’s main talent here. From the way Bill acted around her—a flirtatious man with flirtations too chastely held in check—Chantal suspected some history between them.

  She is ushered into an anteroom and from his chair Cameron looks up, and she sees she will be waiting here alone with him. He lowers a Sports Illustrated. He looks uncomfortable, unsure if he has to talk or can keep reading. Bill bemoaned their difficult relationship, describing his son as “judgmental,” unaware of this pun on his profession, so afraid of his son was he. Cameron closes the magazine, looks up at her again. With the force of a shove she encounters Bill in the son’s eyes. It is all she has seen of Bill in these past eight months; it surprises her and she wails, mouth open, staring at the son. He does not get up. He is afraid. She hugs herself, fiercely, because someone has to.

  IT WAS NOT LIKE he had suddenly become more depressed. He was not happy, no, but you could tell that he never had been. In a way, unhappiness seemed to sustain him, not unlike one of those hound-faced comedians who make a running joke out of their troubles.

  And it could have been the stroke that took him down. She still tries to cling to this. He was not fit. Clothes off, he verged on tubby. He returned from his last physical to tell her, smiling, that he was not unhealthy but delightfully cumbersome, like a stuffed animal. I have the body of an English judge, he said once, eyebrows raised, like this might make some sense to Chantal, who had lived in England for three years before coming across the ocean.

  The autopsy determined a stroke, but one brought on by the fall and head trauma. She asked a doctor if the stroke could have come first, could have been why he fell in the first place. The doctor said probably not, but it was possible. So Bill might have had a stroke, then dropped into the bathtub, hitting his head. So it might have just been a coincidence. A coincidence vachement bizarre.

  Because, this is what she has told no one:

  They had been fighting again. Maybe this is key, maybe it is not. Bill was having a shower, the door ajar and the window open, because the fan needed repair. He enjoyed lo
ng, hot showers, standing swaddled in steam. She was in the living room reading and could hear the spray, the changes to its tone as he moved under it. She was reading Wheat Belly. After their fight she wanted to gently reveal its thesis to him, though this would more than likely make him come home with a cake that he would eat in front of her, in the end making her laugh. She thinks she remembers him singing or humming in the shower, but she cannot be sure, though it was something he would do—sing—during one of their silent fights. But he had not been drinking. Or taking any drugs. It was never drugs with him, except on occasion, and these he would report almost proudly to her, once when he had snorted a line, “a meaty rail,” with a client, and other times when he “saw Tom Bombadil,” which was his assessment of weed.

  So he was sober. He was showering, and maybe singing. She heard something bang and bounce on the counter, then the floor. Even at the time she guessed correctly that it was an empty shampoo bottle thrown over the railing, blindly aimed at the waste bin. Perhaps as a first step toward seeking a truce, she called out, “Are you okay?”

  “What?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Why?”

  “I thought maybe you slipped.”

  There was hardly a pause. Maybe there was no pause.

  “If I slipped it would sound like this.”

  Then, the unimaginable sound of Bill’s body hitting the bathtub.

  There were four tightly connected thuds, four syllables to the sound of his body contacting the coated steel. From the injuries you could tell what body part made a sound. One syllable was an elbow. Another his right shoulder. These were the two middle syllables. One was his general torso, his gut and chest and pelvis hitting the tub’s bottom. That was the last syllable, muffled and deep. The first, the killing blow, was his head. That is how she construed it when she heard it again. For she could hear it, over and over. She had trouble deciding which was the loudest syllable; it was a case not of volume but of tone. Of insistence. Dr. Michel suggested that her ardent attention to the sound as it repeated itself in her head meant that she was trying to hear the instant of Bill’s death. The sound that changed everything. But even hearing it the first time, she had understood what the horrible percussion was telling her. She knew his head fell the farthest. She knew his head hit first.