Like every job in the garden, the staking—why he’d gone out there in the first place—had morphed into something else. But that’s the way it always was and he wasn’t complaining. The longer he stayed out there the better, because inside his wife would be colluding with Georgina, and by late tonight, Pippa and Jax would be there too. Women. He supposed he was resigned to them. To small instances being stretched into tragedies and every sinew of the monster being examined and picked apart. He’d learned just to shut up and go away, and this solution suited everyone. When he’d married, marriage was the only way to have limitless sex without risks, and so like a pill he’d swallowed it. And everyone else was doing it too. Weddings, for several years, replaced dinner-and-movie nights and then there were children and christenings and the whole juggernaut of family milestones, and the sex, he discovered too late, lessened as all those other activities multiplied. It was a sour deal, really, and a secretive one. His father must’ve known but didn’t say anything, just clapped him on the shoulder as though he was proud when what it really meant was “Welcome to the Shithouse, son.” And then the babies had all been girls, which had only hurt him even more. Life, he often thought, was a never-ending fight for virility.
David picked up one of the bamboo stakes at his feet and threaded it through a sprawling rose bush to help steady it. Thinking about that, about having been cheated. About having been marginalized, a minority. Shit, he’d forgotten the staking ties. This morning wasn’t starting well at all. He didn’t even know where those garden ties were. If he couldn’t find them he’d have to buy some, which would mean another fight with his wife because he never came away from the nursery without a trunk full of plants and lately she’d been talking about making the garden smaller and more manageable for the two of them. Every few years she went through a phase like this, her “third-world jag” he called it, where she said they had too much and everyone else too little and shouldn’t they simplify. No, he’d shout at her, we shouldn’t. I’ve worked hard for this. Slaved for it. And it’s not as if, he’d finish, throwing his arms out to make his point, whirling like a dust devil, we can send everything over to Africa. And why would they want it? They’d just ruin a silk rug on those dirt floors and any artwork would be lost on them. It takes a thousand years of prosperity, he’d yell, a thousand years! to understand Michelangelo, and you can forget about Tintoretto or Van Gogh. They’re still trying to keep basic things like toilets going or even just a fucking roof to protect themselves from that god-awful sun. And who would choose to live in a place that hot?? They have to take a little responsibility for that. No—clean water’s the stage they’re at, he’d say when his wife started up. I doubt they even have four walls.
He suspected her of taking boxes of their possessions to local charities when he wasn’t looking but he couldn’t prove it, because the truth was that a truckload of items could be removed from their house every month and the difference would be so slight as to be imperceptible. She was always rearranging things anyway, so he’d given up trying to keep a count.
David rummaged through the shelves in the coach house, looking for the coil of plastic wire he’d used only a few weeks ago on the hollyhocks. He could feel his temper rising. Bloody typical, he muttered. Shambles. Too much to ask, isn’t it, for something to break my way. And then he saw it, the green twist of it, back behind the shears where he’d hidden it from his grandson who, as a toddler, had liked to unspool it and leave trails for the lawnmower to run over. David still hid it as a matter of course, just in case. As if Georgina’s son, at twelve years old, might start playing with it again.
I don’t know why, he thought, glancing down at the house as he crossed the drive and re-entered the roses, they can’t be more like me. I should have insisted on it. Fathers—he stretched the wire out and cut the length he needed, his breathing beginning to level out—should have some say in how their kids end up. Somehow, we should be in charge of it. We would get the results we’re looking for, even with only girls.
His penis nestled up against his leg.
That family, he thought peevishly, looking in the direction of the house, doesn’t know what’s good for them. He’d given them all that they had and they’d repaid him by taking it without a single word of thanks and now—he bent to the roses again—they were trying to sabotage him by making their supposed crises collide with the one thing, the one thing he wanted for himself—this garden tour.
The newspaper that Margaret had open on her lap was completely still. Not even the suggestion of a breeze to flutter it. It was going to be hot. Humid too, she guessed. At least they might get a thunderstorm out of it. The garden could use the water. She pushed her hair back from her face, both hands massaging her scalp, sweating, and lit another cigarette. Letting the smoke find its own way out, a veil across her face, disappearing along her scalp, feathering through her hair like steam. Not that rain, she thought, will be enough to fix the mess in time for his stupidity. She hadn’t gardened for years—he’d finally succeeded in that—but she could still see every last inch of her creation as if she were moving through it, and she knew that this late in the season too many of the plants were making their preparations for the coming snows and it was all out of balance, listing toward dormancy, and would require a level of imagination that she knew the tourists wouldn’t have.
The lake’s northern edge was smeared out of existence by the rising heat, but it was enough for Margaret to see the city’s buildings giving way to the near shore. She could imagine the rest. She’d stared at it often enough, years and years of it, that she could, with her eyes shut, rebuild the entire thing block by stone by tile and she could press it between the pages of one of her books and do it again and again as often as was necessary to make it real. In a room upstairs she had stacks of books like that—collages and assemblages where she put the world in its place. An inventory of everything that mattered. My own private garden, she thought spitefully.
When the children were little they used to sit, all together, at the kitchen table with sliding piles of coloured paper and shoeboxes filled with crayons and markers and bottles of glue, cutting and sticking and stamping and creating masterpiece after masterpiece for display. For the fridge, for the wall, for an envelope sent to their Gran in Toronto. For peace and quiet in a house ruled by voices, each one louder than the one before. The children outgrew it, or turned their backs on it, or fidgeted too much—but Margaret never did. And with whole sections of department stores being turned into shelves of scrapbooking supplies no one ever thought it strange: she was just another housewife making a memory chain, a modern tapestry, a shadow box out of her life. Another made-up activity to give some structure to her day.
But Margaret’s were different. They were secret. They were riddles and conundrums. They were a feast of materials and impressions all layered and woven together so that if one of the girls or David were to look, they wouldn’t understand what they were looking at, not really. Abstract is what Georgina would probably label it. These collages of Margaret’s were a way to slow things down and sort and itemize. To take the unruly mess and give it shape and permanence. And if what she ended up with was contoured and rough then that’s what it was, not her fault. She just put it down as it came. She secured it as it was.
But this … She stared at the lake now, the whole blinding flatness of it, its distance and breadth and the tedium of its colour. What could she do with this … with Pippa, the coming baby, and everyone flooding home to her. How could she catalogue all of that? And now her husband, in what she knew was a fit of arrogance—for he was always striving to best and outmanoeuvre her—had invited the barbarian hordes in to ravage what was left of her beautiful garden.
Margaret settled back onto the chaise longue, legs stretched out and trimly put together, her dressing gown discreetly tucked. God she was tired. Since Pippa had phoned two days ago and asked to come home, Margaret had only slept in patches. She saw her husband’s deep sleeps as a kind of
betrayal. Just another example of his overall cruelty. She turned and looked out at the dogwood and the swathe of tradescantia and knew David was out there somewhere, primping the garden for this ridiculous tour, which he’d organized without consulting her because he knew she would’ve put a stop to it. It was August, when the garden was at its worst, and she would have told him that no one who knew anything about gardens would pay to see this end-of-season tangle of faded blooms. This tour was bound to be a failure. Normally, she’d encourage that for him—any chance to take him down a notch or two—but with Pippa coming home and the upheaval that would already bring …
As Margaret looked, he crossed the drive and went into the coach house. He’ll have forgotten something, she thought. He’ll come down here and ask me where it is. Something he’s misplaced, he will blame on me.
She leaned back, letting her cigarette burn down, thinking about cakes. She’d have to put the fruit on to boil, check there was enough butter, measure the sugar, clean a pan if it wasn’t clean already. Had she washed it after the last one she’d made? He’ll probably eat this one too. The cakes weren’t for him but like everything she did, he assumed they were.
Taking bites out of me for years.
There he was, coming out again. She saw him look at the house before disappearing back into the landscape and she knew that look. It was the coronation look that fastened the Imperial Robe of silk and ermine about his shoulders and St. Edward’s Crown upon his head … the look that made them all courtiers. And it was the look that would gaze at everything she’d made and see nothing. None of it at all. Except what he claimed by the Divine Right of Kings. Which was all.
Margaret lit another cigarette off the old one and tucked the packet in against her leg. Her family hadn’t approved of David, although his medical licence and the income it signalled did, at least, make him viable. Better than some of the other derelicts this only child of theirs had entertained. And there was—thank God—the useful fact that he hailed from Stratford which was something they could work with, massaging the details so that by the time the marriage was inevitable it was understood by everyone who mattered that his pedigree was delicately aligned with Shakespeare himself. They’d used the same modus operandi with their business—a company that supplied food to airlines, finessing that mundane but obscenely lucrative service into a social currency that had made them one of the most prominent philanthropic families in Toronto. Their names were on concert halls and galleries and on major donor lists for the ballet and the theatre and the distinguished all-girls private school Margaret had attended, going to classes in a building with her family name on it. All those advantages, and yet she’d fallen for a boy well outside their orbit.
It’s not that we think he’s wrong for you, her mother had explained. We just think he isn’t right.
Their meeting had been pure chance. The hospital where David was doing his residency was in the same city as the university where Margaret was taking art classes—a pretty collection of buildings with enough prestige to balance out their high acceptance rates. Even so, their paths would never have crossed if that hospital hadn’t been the laughingstock of all the other older medical establishments in Canada because of its innovative programs like hanging original artwork outside the rooms of terminal patients to “heal and give their families a way back to life.” David’s rotation in oncology coincided with Margaret’s artwork having been selected by a committee. It was her first show, and she was giddy with having won the chance to display her canvases, which were docile landscapes in miniature—hay bales and farmhouses and hillsides mostly—and painted in oils so thick she’d applied them with palette knives. An Old World richness, she hoped, at odds with the antiseptic meanness of the hospital. Something safe but voluptuous.
Very nice, he’d said from behind her as she reached both arms up over her head to hang a canvas of a plow. She’d decided to place it high because she knew it was her least successful, and she’d only included it to round her exhibit out to the required ten.
Cheeky, she’d thought, turning around to see who’d said that and noting the quick flick of his eyes up to her face from what—she guessed rightly—was her bottom. It should have incensed her but there was something about his steady cockiness that made her flirt back. Something teasing and attractive and new, something dangerous, which fit perfectly into her view of herself just then as a creative force with unbridled appetites. That very night they’d lain on her narrow bed before going out to dinner, Margaret quizzing him on her anatomy and David holding her down and tracing it with his teeth.
Birds of a feather, he’d smiled as he gnawed on her breastbone.
He was older, but she’d already given up on the boys her age. She’d tried, over and over, but always found them too timid, too circumspect. She’d decided that what she needed was a Diego Rivera—and she’d found him in David, she thought. Someone out of the ordinary who would provoke her artistic nature into creating works of magnificence.
You’re a goad, she’d said gleefully as he mounted her.
Yes! he’d cried. A goat! A randy goat.
But a doctor’s wife, she discovered after she’d married him, couldn’t paint pictures of vaginas rupturing and expect them to be hung in the public domain. Only her husband, she discovered, had the rights to that.
She’d had to find another way.
And so the collages and the children and the difficult husband and the house and the gardens. It was really, Margaret thought, curling her toes back and feeling a surge of pride, I who’ve arranged all of this. A maelstrom to keep her world spinning.
3
Georgina placed the secateurs at the monkshood’s stem. She ran them down a few feet and snapped through, brutal and efficient, a faint ooze of blood trailing across her fingers where the blade had pinched them. The bloom was a faded almost cobalt blue, starting to brown, but she’d use it anyway. She’d just make the rest up—the freshness, the gloss, the colour so saturated it hit you full on … wasn’t that what she did, after all—make things up? Wasn’t that her role as an associate professor of art history? She whacked at another stem. The artist meant this, the artist meant that, the artist was copying, emulating, paying homage to … all just a con job. And what about me? she thought, sweeping her eyes across the perennials. Monet had his precious lilies and enough water to drown himself in, Gauguin had all the flesh and the dogs, and Picasso his masks and Van Gogh with his goddamn razor blade and I, I have—. She jabbed at a daisy. This. No spectacle in that. Like a print on a schoolgirl’s dress.
Along the gravel path at the border’s rear there were weeds pushing up everywhere and the hollyhocks, some of them, were nearly horizontal. Someone had begun staking them, she could see that, but had only made it a third of the way and of the remainder, the outsized flower heads were winning. She chopped the few plume poppies still blooming, some phlox, coneflowers, rudbeckia, shastas until she had an immense armful she could split between all the bedrooms. There’d even be enough for her parents’ room, and she knew they were going to need that added fragrance because the air passing between them ever since Georgina had arrived was acrid, and bound to get worse. This garden tour, she knew from experience, had all the hallmarks of a calamity.
Hefting the flowers onto her hip the way you’d hold a child, Georgina paused to watch a bee fly through and land on a bloom and flit away immediately, as if it knew the flower was dead and not worth the effort. As if the pollen shrivelled to nothing when it was cut, lost its usefulness, its taste—all in the last ten minutes. Did bees have a sense of taste? She doubted it, but she doubted a lot of things. Wasn’t her whole life guided by that? Everything elevated for scrutiny. Georgina lifted a sandal and tipped it, releasing a rivulet of little stones that had been trapped there. She looked up at the house and saw the ivy creeping up to the eaves and digging into the mortar between the stones, pulling the paint loose. Beginning to smother her bedroom window. They’ll need to find someone to trim it back, sh
e thought, remembering what her mother had told her about the man who’d trimmed it the last eighteen autumns. That he’d broken his back in a fall the previous spring and, her mother had declared as she threw her hands out in exasperation, refuses to climb a ladder now. Even a stepstool. As if he had no right to caution, no good reason to leave them so completely in the lurch. As if her family and this house must always be taken into account. That they were the control group the rest of the world was measured against. The foundation for everything; the template for all there was.
Georgina supposed that the ivy, too, would be something they’d task her with.
She cut across the grass and went in the front door, thinking her mother might be on the porch by now and that going in this way might buy her a little time before her mother started interfering, because Georgina wanted all the pleasure of arranging the bouquets for herself. Her own garden wasn’t much more than a few self-sustaining shrubs and a wash of yellowing ferns underneath a couple of poplar trees. There were no cutting gardens, or really much of anything. She dropped the flowers into a pile next to the sink, the mass of them spreading out across the sugar bowl and the round tin of tea bags and the old pewter bowl her parents collected their food scraps in. The kitchen was bright, the rising sunlight flooding it, and Georgina felt a lightening of her spirit as if some unpleasantness had been avoided and she could relax and enjoy just being there in the moment, by herself, under the cascading beauty of a fine summer day and these frothy waves of petals.
Summer Cannibals Page 2