by Gaston Bill
Cheryl’s father nods blankly as they shake hands. He’s shorter than Jack imagined, has thinning rusty hair tied back in a ponytail, and his lined face is weathered red. A rounder face even than Cheryl’s, a true pie. Simon sits and turns to wave broadly at the waiter, grunting in comic desperation as he does, mumbling that he’s been in fucking India for Chrissake, and needs a drink.
“Jack always gets the lasagna,” Cheryl says when the waiter comes. “He says it’s fantastic.”
“Do you have a vegetarian version?” Simon asks the waiter.
“You’ve gone veggie?” Cheryl laughs and turns to Jack, though she keeps looking at her father. “This is a man who eats moose brains.”
“Goat brains, please.” He looks up to explain loudly to the waiter, “It was moose nose.” Turning to Jack, he announces, one hand placed gently on his chest as if in contrition, “I have eaten a moose’s nose. Which means I’ve eaten beef-flavoured sponge.” He looks back up at the waiter. “Do you? Maybe a meatless lasagna? A mooseless lasagna?”
The waiter says the chef can probably make one up and Simon smiles his thanks, nodding quickly. Jack orders a bottle of Chianti, wanting a wine that’s thick and savoury. So Cheryl’s father is a loud old hippie.
“No, I’m not veggie—not yet,” Simon continues, as if to a general audience. “Just weaning myself off India. If I had roast beef or something tonight my gall bladder would probably blow through my rib cage. Which might get all over, ah—”
“Jack.”
“—Jack.”
“What were you doing in India, Dad?”
Jack eyes Cheryl, who’s grinning, proud as punch of her colourful dad. Okay, well, of course. Dad is charming and funny, like award-winning humanitarians can afford to be. And as per all fathers, he thinks his daughter is perfect and deserves the best and therefore doesn’t like the suitor named Ah-Jack.
Simon explains that he has been barging down a section of the middle Ganges with a frightened doctor and boxes of vaccines, checking water quality and exploring possible sites for a new kind of extremely inexpensive ground-water pump.
Cheryl announces that, speaking of the Ganges, she has to go to the bathroom. Equally deadpan, her father adopts an English accent to warn her to mind the corpses. Jack understands where Cheryl got her humour and sees how easily she rises to it. He feels his jealousy; he’s out of their league in this department. Though who needs that department? Or their league?
Apropos of Cheryl being gone, Simon says, “So you’re the new one.”
“Well, it’s been six months.”
“Oh, hmm. Cheryl said there was a brand-new—” He stops. He looks at Jack steadily, eyes bright. “So that would be you. Otherwise I am eating my foot.”
Over a hollowing stomach, Jack makes himself smile. He instantly tops up Simon’s wine and then his own, showing nothing but confidence on his face. A joke occurs to him, perhaps in their league, about Simon’s foot-eating and his gall bladder, but he has waited too long.
“Well, I can’t keep up with her,” her father says, blushing at the throat. “She’s quite something.”
“She is.”
“Living up there in her aerie, keeping an eye on Mammon for me.”
So that’s where she got the aerie bit. And the opinion of herself. An adoring father.
“Jack. So what do you, ah—?”
“Do?” Cheryl hadn’t bothered telling her father what the new one did. If in fact he was the new one. “I sell mutual funds.” He meets Simon’s eye. “I sell Mammon.”
“Aha!”
Jack watches Simon do a good job hiding whatever contempt he feels, and this involves a scrunching of brow and a distant look. But then Simon asks, “Is it too late to buy in now, do you think?”
“Mutual funds?”
“Yes.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s hard to know what to believe.”
“Belief has nothing to do with it.”
“Perhaps, yes, but let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the world economy is heading to hell in a bucket. Again. Mutual funds?”
“It’s not.”
“Well, let’s just say it is.” Simon dons a theatrically perplexed face, spreading his hands out to span the table. “Mutual funds, or gold?” Now he relaxes into the professorial, even raises a single finger. “Gold seems to be the thing, no? If history’s any proof?”
“History doesn’t count anymore. Everything’s new.” He can be crazy and poetic too. “Gold is an old Volvo. Funds are a Formula One race—”
“I own a Volvo!”
Jack briefly lifts his eyebrows as if to say, Of course you do.
“Dad! The jimmy!” Back from the bathroom, Cheryl stands over them, excited about something. She looks and acts younger still.
“The jimmy!” Simon echoes her. “Oh God, yes!”
“I’ll go get it!”
“Yes! Go!”
Cheryl turns and almost runs out of Mister Mario’s, out the door through which they’d come, not even looking back at Jack, like he isn’t worth the time to explain.
Simon beams at something remembered, shaking his head, then notices Jack. “Has she told you about …?”
“‘The jimmy’? Um, nope.”
“Jack.” Simon shakes his head some more, chuckling soundlessly, watching where his daughter had gone. “Cheryl has this, this little ‘artefact’ I brought back from Indonesia years ago. Little island pronounced ‘toot.’ Practical-joke kind of gift. You’ve seen how Cheryl and I, um … She hasn’t shown you the jimmy?”
“Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“You’d know. Anyway, it’s something we’ve come to feel bad about—about her having—and so, and so, since I’m going back next month, back to Toot, we thought I should take it back and give it back. I’ve organized a burial ceremony, actually.”
Jack sits nodding. He listens to Cheryl’s father go on about a people’s cherished remains being looted and defiled through the centuries—Jack wants to shout, You looted Toot?—and how it is a crime only now being rectified.
“Even Egypt. Where did we get off robbing graveyards? No matter how grand. It’s like the more a people revere their dead, the more we get all horny to find it and take it and …”
Jack can think only of Cheryl and how abandoned he felt as she left, how he wanted to follow her up to her apartment, not stay down here with this effervescent man who makes him feel his own dullness, who speaks to him as though to a student.
Their main courses arrive and Simon groans in appreciation of “this absolute feast,” a subtle attempt to remind Jack how guilty he should feel about his country’s wealth and privilege. Jack says, wryly, “Hey, all you want is here in Four Corners,” but Simon misses the joke, if that’s what it is, and Jack knows he may have slurred a bit. Both men hover over their steaming plates waiting for Cheryl. Jack butters a bread slice, figuring to soak up some of the wine that has gotten the better of him. He watches the back door.
“I mean, Jack, what would you do if some archeologist went to your—”
“Cheryl says she wants to be an archeologist.”
“Well, yes. Ethno. And she will be. Has she decided yet?”
“About …”
“If it’s Dalhousie or L.A. Please tell me it’s Dalhousie.”
“I think it’s Dalhousie.”
“Good. Anyway, so what if some archeologist in, in Wales went to your great-great-grandsomebody’s grave and said, ‘I’ll just have a scrape of this guy’s DNA so I can see if—’”
“Did Cheryl tell you I was Welsh?”
“‘Davies.’ I guessed. So I can see if …”
Jack caught how he’d asked his question so hopefully. Does Cheryl even know he’s Welsh? How much has he ever told her about anything? Did she tell him about going off to either L.A. or Dalhousie? Maybe.
Jack takes sips now, putting the brakes on. He chews bread. He’s on the verge of making a fool of himself. He ha
tes that he wants this man to like him. Where he wants to be is upstairs in her apartment, flipping through some pages with her, the pictures of distant shores, which would be her ethno-books of course; their shoulders are pressing, her hair draped so deliciously over them both, he can see why women are made to hide their hair in so many of those countries of hers, then she flips it all away to expose her neck to him. Mayor of Blanketville, yes. He should have asked her more questions about herself, not let her get away with being so private. And he should have told her more about himself. And about Shannon, about how another new layer of skin grows to protect from each mean flick of the tongue. About how never really listening to Cheryl is part of that thickened skin of his. He really needs most of all to tell her that his ears, and his heart, are full of skin.
“… and anyway, I see I’m ranting and rambling. The thing is, it’s a treat not to need a translator.” Old school, Simon rises from his chair a half a foot to greet his returning daughter. “And here she is.”
Holding a hand reverently before her, Cheryl approaches the table carrying something small wrapped in sky-blue cloth. With a serious air she gently places the cloth on the table, near her father’s plate, then carefully seats herself. Father and daughter incline their heads and murmur something. He hears Simon say something about needing a cooler, and getting it through customs.
“If we, if we ever get serious, ever get married,” Jack is suddenly saying, smiling like it’s a joke, looking not at them but at the far wall and its plaster frieze of gondolas, “I could pay your, your archeology. You know. School.”
He hears his drunken rhythmlessness even as he speaks, then their silence. His urge had been to mischief perhaps, maybe to invade their rude intimacy. He finds himself grinning at the father. He sees the quick look Cheryl and the father share.
“Jack’s been into the wine a bit, Dad,” Cheryl says, blushing beautifully, eyeing her cannelloni for the first time. “You’ve been into the plonk, my darling,” she says flatly to Jack, not looking at him. It’s the second time tonight she’s called him “darling,” and she is being nasty.
“Yes I have!” Jack sings, grinning.
“Fine, Jack,” Cheryl says.
“Your stupid mammony-man. The new one.” He doesn’t quite yell. A passing waiter, a young, possibly gay dude with gleaming shaven head smiles back over his shoulder at them like he understands their table completely.
Ignoring Jack, Cheryl turns to her father and nods to the blue cloth. “Anyway.”
He can be direct too. He says, sternly, “Cheryl.” He waits till she looks at him before he tells her, “I was going to break up with you tonight.”
She stops, waits until she sees that nothing more is coming, then whispers, “Really?” Her father pretends to be examining the artefact now, the jimmy, but Cheryl’s smiling at him, only on the one side like that, lovely, meeting his eye, not afraid of him in the slightest, never had been. Her face is aflame in humour, even delight.
So it wasn’t just him being private.
Her eyes on him, he can hardly see. He loves her now, but things are probably done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Original versions of these stories appeared in the following publications: “House Clowns” in The Malahat Review, “Cake’s Chicken” in Fiddlehead, “Any Forest Seen from Orbit” in Event, “Petterick” in The Malahat Review, “Geriatric Arena Grope” in Fiddlehead, “To Mexico” in Numero Cinq, “Black Roses Bloom” in Prism International, “At Work in the Fields of the Bulwer-Lytton” in Numero Cinq, and “Four Corners” in Event. Thank you to the editors.
Thanks to John Gould, Jay Ruzesky, Jay Connolly, Terence Young, Bill Stenson, Dede Crane, Sam Shelstad, Dave Wilson, and to Connor for the stolen chicken. Big thanks to Nick Garrison and everyone at Hamish Hamilton, and to Carolyn Forde at Westwood.
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc., a Penguin Random House Company
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2014
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Copyright © Bill Gaston, 2014
Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Gaston, Bill, 1953-, author
Juliet was a surprise / Bill Gaston.
Short stories.
ISBN 978-0-14-319241-1 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8563.A76J84 2014 C813’.54 C2014-901271-3
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eBook ISBN 978-0-14-319203-9
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