Juliet Was a Surprise

by Gaston Bill

  The four syllables took one second. Within this duration of sound she had been overwhelmed, Dr. Michel told her, and the sound had engraved itself. Which was why the sound would not stop. And why she could not sleep. And could not concentrate. Chantal found this odd, because was not concentration the opposite of falling asleep?

  Even as the doctor was explaining all of this, the insistent four-syllable murmur fought with his voice, and she understood that she had been infected. She asked Dr. Michel if that sounded accurate, that she had been “infected” by a sound, and he considered, then nodded, and said it would not be inaccurate to see it this way. He added that it was not unlike a soldier’s being infected with an image of a sudden and bloody explosion.

  There were other images—why had they let her be? There was the sound of his breath after the fall. It was like a loud sigh, one admitting, “Well wasn’t that stupid of me.” But it was the last exhalation, the heralding of death’s perfect peace—this she knew before she drew the curtain back. Sometimes she thought it had sounded like relief, a person’s relief to finally be dead, and perhaps because of this the image was allowed to fade. As would the sudden smell as she drew the curtain—his bowels. As would the sight of him, face down, the off-kilter alignment of limbs that left no doubt.

  There in Dr. Michel’s office, Chantal was stricken by his agreement of “infected,” and she panicked, speechless, leaping from her chair to flail her arms as if swimming through the gruesome rhythmic thumping. It was a claustrophobia and a torture one had never heard of. The non-stop sound of one’s love, dying. Dr. Michel came round to take her shoulders and face her, his touch stopping the sound for a moment.

  “Time,” he said. As if to inoculate her with this truth, he squeezed her shoulders and repeated himself.

  It has been eight months. Though it sometimes recedes in volume, the sound in its constant rhythm has become not smoother but instead more crude, and fierce, skin and bone and spat. In the way a repeated word loses meaning, this word gains it, though the meaning is something she cannot understand other than as one understands nausea. It has become a clownish word, an American-sounding word. Sometimes she is certain Bill is mocking her. It is never not there. Usually it is softly percussive, like her own breathing, but there are times when she cannot hear people talking to her. There are times at work when she reads the prompter and gestures with balletic hand the contour of the frontal system approaching from the west, and the sound follows her hand and grows in idiotic volume as if she were beckoning it from the bathroom.

  She still does not know what any of it means. What does this infection mean?

  ONE. BILL HAD A STROKE in the shower, then fell, hitting his head. This was possible, said the doctor. Making it far less possible was the detail they did not know, which was him announcing, “If I slipped it would sound like this,” then having a stroke and falling. If this were the actual scenario, it would amount to a coincidence the size of which would prove that absurdity is the essential spirit of God.

  Two. Bill said what he said, then launched himself. They were fighting and he did not care about anything except the blooming of an unimaginable joke. This lunatic scenario does unfortunately catch the soul of Bill. Mort de rire.

  Three. Bill said what he said, and to create the sound he moved to pound the tub with a fist. In his eagerness to perform well, he slipped. But if he was already bent over close enough to the tub to pound it, how had his head fallen so fatally far?

  Four. Bill said what he said, then decided to kill himself as the punchline to the best joke he had ever told. But dashing your head on porcelain, even from six feet up, is a very uncertain way of ending it all. Unless he was so instantly desperate to die that he did not consider the method.

  Five. She did not know him at all. He was an awful magus who infected her, impregnated her with his last instant of vitality, in keeping with an ugly man eternally jealous about his beautiful wife.

  Six. Bill envisioned everything. His joke-that-keeps-ontelling was his lawyer’s knowledge that she could lose the insurance money if anyone caught even a whisper of numbers three through five. Or this one, six.

  Seven. None of the above. She does not understand what happened.

  CHANTAL HAS STOPPED crying and is embarrassed. She takes a seat two chairs from Cameron, whose face is not sympathetic, whose eyes are half-closed. She imagines this is the look he wears at any thought of her. He seems to have forgotten his magazine.

  Of course there were suspicions, right from the start, about everything, as if all beauty-and-beast unions are sordid. Worst of all was her age, and this closeness to Cameron’s. She is almost his contemporary, and he knows “what makes her tick,” is the odd expression. She still hurts recalling the evening Bill “accidentally” left them alone for an hour and she tried her utmost to be friendly. She smiled overmuch, and yes, she touched his shoulder—it was a nice black-on-brown linen shirt—and his hard glance back denounced a coquette. She wonders if Cameron remembers that evening when he was over for dinner (trying to impress, she prepared salade de canard confit) and Bill seemingly insulted her. When she mentioned to Cameron her ambitions to be a TV news journalist Bill had snorted and under his breath mumbled, “Now that’s an oxymoron,” and while she understood that he had snorted at the oxymoron and not at her, she suspected that Cameron, smirking into his salade, heard only the snort, the apparent insult. She had been too shy, and proud, to speak up and fix things.

  She notices now that Cameron has dressed up in good clothes for this, out of respect for his father. The charcoal sports coat looks new. His trousers are rumpled near the crease. As far as she knows, he still lives alone.

  She wants to tell him that she can still hear his father, hear him hitting the tub. She wants to ask him if it is possible for something to be this vachement coincidentale.

  Cameron, perfectly unmoving. The heavily lidded eyes. It strikes her that maybe he is just sad. He is as inscrutable as his father. He exudes a familiar depth.

  “Cameron. Can you please do me the favour of taking the car? Will you have the Porsche?”

  He tilts his head, eyeing her, surprised. He speaks clearly and slowly.

  “Wouldn’t be legal.” He can mock a word like his father could.

  “Please. A son should have his father’s car.”

  “Well, some fathers don’t think that way, I guess.”

  “No, it is mostly selfish of me to ask. You see, it will make me feel better, and I want to feel better.”

  This makes him look away, into the middle distance. His expression is impossible to read. The foot of his crossed leg begins to beat a rhythm in the air, but he catches himself and stops it. Unlike his father, he works out. He has a large chest and shoulders, but he ignores his legs. She tries again.

  “Did you know, he did not like the car?”

  “What, wrong colour?”

  “No. But, maybe he did not leave it to you because he did not like it.”

  “Right.”

  But he looks half-taken by this thought.

  “Do you know why he did not like it? He bought it, remember, when he was made partner?”

  Cameron looks at her.

  “A vintage car, rare car, perfect in all ways. He did not like it, because he was supposed to love it.”

  Cameron snorts. “Sounds like him.”

  He stares off with a near-smile and she waits for whatever memory he is having to blossom and fade. She does not tell him about her own dislike of the car, following the time they were flying along the highway, top down, and as they approached and then flew past the concrete wall of an overpass he pretended to suddenly turn into it, to kill them instantly. Ten seconds passed before he yelled over the sound of the wind, “Ooops.” She was furious. She was scared.

  “So, you will have the car?”

  “I’ll think about it.” Cameron’s eyes have rimmed silver, and she can hear his father’s background rhythmic murmur, like a mindless lullaby, a body killing
itself with its own weight.

  English judge, English judge.

  Cameron shakes his head at his private thoughts. He is an uncomplicated boy, not a beast like his father.

  “Do you that think he wanted to live?” she asks him.

  She hears Bill’s flesh and bones hitting the tub as she meets the sincere gaze of this son, and she sees Bill alive in the eyes. Nothing else of Cameron looks like Bill, but the eyes make all of him beautiful. He does not appear surprised by her question. His eyes are tearing all the more. She sees that, like her, he feels responsible. And he seems to know what she is asking. Exactly what she is asking.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Why did he not love us enough to stay?”

  He doesn’t hesitate in saying, more softly, “I don’t know.”

  “Me too,” Chantal agrees. She is crying, but already eased by what he has said. This will help, to have a comrade. She thinks she can hear this.

  Petterick

  Peter gazed at nothing and the uncle watched the football game—so why did it feel like they were staring hard over their glasses at each other? Today as on all Sundays it was torture to wait here with him, Lily’s Uncle Ray, the way he sat with both arms splayed along the couch back like a lounging Jesus, how some fingers nervously tapped while a knee jigged—a portrait of a martyr doing his duty and straining at the ropes. At the nails!

  Peter snorted wisely.

  “What?” The wiry uncle turned to him, smiling.

  “Nothing. A kind of pun.”

  Uncle Ray watched him until he saw no more was coming, then looked back to the game.

  “So, less than nothing,” Peter added.

  At this, her uncle blinked once, hard and long.

  Just as unbearable was the smell here. It was a kind of breath gone deeply off, meat-sickness at its base, and today as always he imagined someone’s floating intestinal bacteria, unhinged and potent in his nose—Peter had to stop this train of thought that made him breathe shallow, that kept him on the edge of his seat. But whose breath? Lily, almost thigh to thigh with him on buses after movies, offered up ordinary breath with its evidence of popcorn or garlic or movie-nap. So he’d checked her mother and her uncle—nothing—and yet their apartment festered on. Maybe under the sink a rat had slipped behind things while signing off, its pace of rot stealthily mild.

  Whatever the smell’s source, Lily would soon emerge through it from the dark hallway like a contradiction. She wouldn’t fit because she was beautiful. Peter was almost certain she was beautiful.

  But as usual Lily was taking her time emerging, and here in the living room Uncle Ray kept him company with limp chat and questions, stuff you could answer with your tongue alone. (From some shadowed distance Peter heard a drawer softly thunk. What delicious thing was Lily doing?)

  Though Ray had angled to engage in conversation, he couldn’t not glance at the football scramble on the screen and now his glance had grown permanent. The man wore a constant near-smirk; he seemed always about to say, with avuncular irony, “Here I am doing my duty, and there you are perched on the edge of your seat, a nervous suitor.” But someone like Ray would never say something like that. The smirk was camouflage, just like—again Peter snorted wise—his own shallow breathing and perching wasn’t what it seemed.

  Tired of pretending to care about the quarterback who’d unretired and come back to resurrect the Jets, Peter decided to speak. Why he used the English accent he wasn’t sure, because usually he reserved it for those brief, singsong arguments he tended to have with café waiters: Looking up from the menu, “Is it really?” Looking into one’s cup, “Are you sure?”

  He said this: “You don’t suppose it’s somehow telling that we’re all, um, practitioners of the non-nuclear family?”

  Accent or not, there followed a gap, into which Uncle Ray leaned and squinted, as if his hearing were the problem. He uncrossed his legs. He said, “I’m not sure exactly what …”

  Peter meant that Lily, at thirty, shared an apartment with a mother and an uncle. He told Ray that this resembled the leavings of a large family culled by war. He added, “Maybe you didn’t know I live alone?”

  “Well, hey, no. I didn’t.” Uncle Ray still looked less than comprehending as he regarded Peter warily. The screenscramble began again and Peter was happy to make him miss a play. He was also happy that Lily had escaped the genes of that long nose.

  Peter helped. “Alone. You can’t be less nuclear than that, I don’t think.”

  “I guess not.”

  “In that a nucleus needs—” Peter raised his eyebrows encouragingly.

  “Stuff around it, sure.”

  Peter could see that this conversation had caused Ray to like him even less. In fact Ray looked desperate. Perhaps he’d just leave for once, which would be excellent. Peter wasn’t sure if the mother was home. Imagine if he and Lily had the place to themselves! He would walk in that direction, at last. Her bed. He’d seen it once, the first time he’d come, thirteen weeks ago, when Lily and her non-nuclear family had given him the tour.

  Through the musk of his wish Peter saw Ray’s spasm, heard the whispered “Always on Sunday.” Peter didn’t care. The man was perfectly named. Ray was thin, tanned, focused, a beam of American hotdog.

  At least Ray hadn’t asked the usual “How’s school?” Its scorn so subtle it was all the more barbed. How could it not be scorn? Peter was in Linguistics; why would Ray call it school? An elementary word that carried the question, Why is someone your age still in it? And, sure, perhaps Ray had a case, Lily no doubt having described Peter’s flight from English to Art History, back to English—this time Olde and with a Latin buttress—then to Biology, and now Linguistics, a search spanning over a decade. He would get a degree in another year if … but in any case, honest indecision was no cause for scorn. Unlike decision, which led countless men like Uncle Ray to lives of quiet desperation in retail.

  A faint snap of plastic on plastic had both men turn their faces to it. The female noise had travelled far, down corridors, through closed doors. Peter found it such an of-a-sort apartment. Probably luxurious back when, expensive in any case, the three-bedroom felt if anything too spacious, all in that yellowbeige whose fade suggests dirt despite being clean. Its sprawl of walls needed tightening, and more pictures wouldn’t do it. Though two storeys up a reasonable brownstone, it reminded Peter, impossibly, of the word rancher. The only thing missing was a wet bar fronted by thick grout bearing multicoloured riverstones.

  Or maybe it was just that Lily was off down that dim hall and too far away.

  Uncle Ray’s body still angled at him for conversation but his head pointed directly away at football and was holding there, a man twisted in duty. A shoulder was also up as a kind of barrier. One team was yellow and black while the other was a dark cat-grey that flashed to mallard. Up ahead lay Super Bowl Sunday, when one of these teams would be alive and the other golfing, said the commentator.

  LILY HAD ONCE CALLED HIM “a throwback,” careful to laugh and squeeze his biceps when she said it. Peter loved her for that. In his sparse social life, he felt he was little more than a repository for signals, most of them bad: he was old-fashioned, awkward, he was some arrogant curio. Rarely were the signals … affectionate squeezes.

  Once, on the bus, after his knowing quip about Nicole Kidman’s height, wherein he used the terms “emasculation” and “kindly camera angle,” she called him “suave.” She said it with cheerful amazement, as if identifying a force no longer in vogue. Peter smiled simply and lifted an eyebrow for her.

  And the best signal of all came in the café near the movie theatre. Her latte done, she’d interrupted him as he pressed biscotti crumbs from his plate while wondering aloud about Chomsky and how the word “cranky,” meaning whiny, likely had its origins in “crank,” meaning genius-nobody-listened-to, or maybe it was the other way around, but wasn’t it telling that linguistics could lead to concerns of global— She grabbed bo
th his hands in hers, found his eyes and wouldn’t let them go as she said, “You are so decent-looking for a duck.” She had called him an “odd duck” enough times to trim it down for humour, and for intimacy.

  Decent-looking. Holding his hands. The main difference between Lily and every other girl he’d ever spoken to was that most of her signals were good.

  “SO YOU TWO OFF to your movie?” Uncle Ray didn’t meet his eye in the asking, but he seemed to have healed because his near-smirk was back.

  “We’re—not sure.” It felt almost risqué, saying this. Yes, it was Sunday and Sundays they went to a movie, but no, they weren’t sure. Ray? If you’re talking about Lily and Peter, anything might happen.

  Ray stood quickly, as if he hadn’t believed Peter’s boast of not being sure and was going to have it out with him right now.

  “Well, I’m off. To do some things. You can just”—Ray flicked a finger at the kitchen, then the remote control, and then, sadly it seemed, at the TV—“make yourself at you know.”

  Peter stood to shake the uncle’s hand. “Okay, Ray,” he said, pumping a surprisingly obedient limb twice, then letting it go. Ray glanced back once more at the game.

  It was more or less always this way. Though their time together was civilized, they mutually dismissed each other with signals that were clear.

  “LILY AND PETER” was better than “Peter and Lily.” He explained to her that “Lily and Peter” began and ended with soft vowels and rose like a mountain on the two hard e’s of the middle. “Peter and Lily” was just a bumpy rural road. Lily confessed to not liking her name. Peter asked if this was because her tongue bumped her palette twice so quickly. She said she didn’t know; maybe it was that she couldn’t live up to a flower, flowers being perfect and never smelling bad—she shot him a look and he wondered if she was acknowledging her apartment. Her father’s nickname for her had been Tiger-Lily, then just Tiger. She told Peter he died when she was eight, and Peter could see in her eyes the memories that were now burnished false. In any case, he then snorted at his own name, which he announced he detested. Why? asked Lily. Because, he answered, he was an idiot Principle. He was robbed to pay Paul, and he was mocked for being a Pumpkin Eater. Also, he didn’t have a longer, more elegant name for sanctuary, like Richard could help a Rick, or Robert saved a Bob. Even as a child he’d wished he had a Petterand or Petterick to ascend to, like rising into a regal posture that was his birthright.