Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  “I take it that it didn’t go too well.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “Only because your mother has called six times since lunch.” He sounds annoyed. “She really wants you to call her back.”

  Violet feels like she might explode at Brian, but manages to keep it in check. She has no right to be angry with him.

  “Vi. Call your mother.”

  Violet doesn’t answer.

  “Vi?”

  “All right, already!”

  A week later, having ignored daily phone messages from her mother, and two days after she and Brian had agreed on their guerrilla wedding plans, Violet picks up the phone and calls: “Mom?”

  “I’m so sorry, Violet.”

  “Mom?” Violet is expecting to have to defend herself. She is expecting her mother to begin by asking her to listen: if you can listen without interrupting, dear. When setting out to settle a dispute, her mother will usually lay out in great detail the pieces of her argument before either pronouncing victory or agreeing to disagree. She never begins with an apology. And she never admits to being wrong.

  “Violet, dear, it was never my wish to take over your wedding. I’m afraid I got a little bit carried away. You know how it is when the wheels are in motion. You know how I love to plan. Your Aunt Louise always used to say I should have made it my career. Not having had the chance to plan your sister’s wedding, I guess I was hoping against hope. I should have known you would want to make your own arrangements. Ever since you were a little girl you’ve had your own way of doing things. I knew that, but I thought maybe I could persuade you. But that was a mistake.”

  She pauses, as if trying to get her emotions under control. Violet can hear a faint clacking sound like her mother is nibbling on the arm of her reading glasses.

  “That was just my pride talking. I want you to know, dear, that I take full responsibility for what happened. And before you say anything, just let me say that I am not going to apologise for your father. Even though I feel to blame for what happened between you and him that day — if I hadn’t made such a fuss. You know what he’s like. My knight in tarnished armour.”

  “What did you call him?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter, Violet. He’s so deeply embarassed. I won’t apologise for him because—”

  “Did you say my knight in tarnished armour?”

  “Because he wants to do that himself, when we come to the wedding.”

  Violet is speechless.

  “He’ll be shattered if you say you don’t want him to come.”

  Violet’s sceptical nature now feels the full weight of her mother’s assault. Her mother is not yet pleading, but Violet has the strong impression that any resistance on her part might tip her in that direction.

  “I want you and Dad to come to the wedding, Mom,” she says, in monotone.

  “Of course you do, dear. I knew you did. I’m just so sorry it had to come to this. I’ve made such a mess of things.”

  “Mom, it’s okay, really it is.”

  “No, Violet, it’s not okay. Let me finish. I don’t know how I could have allowed so much distance to come between us. You have to understand that in a marriage you sometimes have to go against your better judgement.”

  Violet recognizes once again her mother’s legendary ability to play both sides, while always coming out on the winning side — the art of the powerless.

  “I want us to be close again, Violet.”

  Violet wants to ask when they had last been close. She wonders what has happened in the days between her getaway and her picking up the phone to call her mother. She imagines a big scene in which, like Dorothy pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard, her mother at long last calls her father’s bluff. Part of that unmasking would have been her mother grasping the role she had played in supporting her husband over the years.

  Her mother finishes with a flourish. She says she understands that Brian’s immigration issues have pushed up the date of their wedding, but what she really wants to know, has to know, is that her daughter is marrying for love.

  “You have to marry for love,” she says.

  Violet thinks she may laugh. At the same time she is relieved. This is the mother she knows. Beneath her sincerity lies insincerity, and below that again sincerity and below that again insincerity, and so on.

  Still, in the weeks following, Violet keeps coming back to this conversation, to her mother’s closing words: “You have to marry for love.”

  As performances go, Violet decides, it ranks with one of her mother’s best. Through an act of contrition she persuades Violet to suspend her judgement. A stroke of genius, Violet thinks, because it allows both of them to indulge the thought that they can grow. It fools them into thinking that they still hold within themselves the possibility of change.

  It is two months later, the afternoon of the wedding ceremony. Violet stands arm-in-arm with her Armani-clad father at the entrance to the crumbling concrete bunker at Fort Amherst. Elements of that phone conversation with her mother are still with her. For the first time, it strikes Violet that her mother might have been nothing but sincere.

  She lays a hand on the back of her father’s hand, steals a glance at him. He looks so handsome, so elegant, she thinks. He has been a perfect gentleman since his arrival the day before: charming everyone with his praise of the city, asking to be taken to visit various sites — the Basilica, the Battery, Cape Spear. Violet can see he has done his homework. He is first out with his crocodile-skin wallet and gold card every time a bill comes around. He waxes eloquent about the beauty of the landscape, so much so that he almost persuades her. Violet acts as though she has forgotten that it is always possible to see the city’s scabby winter self — its true self — beneath the summer foliage and blooms.

  Starting down the stone steps, her father gives her arm a gentle squeeze, inadvertently reminding her of the bruise that resulted from their last encounter, a bruise that had subsequently turned every colour of shame. She is thankful he has not tried to apologise.

  Drifting up through the stairwell comes the gentle lilting of The Waterboys’ “A Man is in Love,” the sound of the ocean booming gently behind it. The Waterboys is Brian’s choice, not hers. She would have chosen something by Joni Mitchell.

  She has to remind herself it’s her wedding day.

  Her chin almost rests on the neckline of her dress as she navigates the steps. Her wedding dress is a saffron-coloured lace mini she bought on Commercial Drive. With each step, she feels the frill of tiny jade beads lift and fall on her thighs. Her shaved legs show slight razor burn where they disappear into her emerald-green Doc Martens boots. She is glad she decided against wearing a hat: hats don’t suit her — her neck is too short. “I like a woman with a good head on her shoulders,” Keppie used to tease. Instead of a hat, she wears baby’s breath in her hair and carries a small posy of pansies and marigolds.

  She descends the stairwell with her well-coiffed and powdered father. It is an extremely hot day; the weather man has called for afternoon temperatures in excess of thirty degrees. Who could have guessed it of the old fog capital of the western world? She is worried that they will be uncomfortable all crammed together in such close quarters, but her fears prove unfounded. The concrete bunker, embedded in the rock of the Southside Hills, acts like a natural root cellar, keeping the air cool. She worries also that it will smell. The abandoned defence complex has long been a favourite hangout for druggy teens and students on the beer. But she detects only the waft of incense mixed with a powerful after-shave that she guesses belongs to Geoff. She will find out later that Keppie and some friends power-washed the whole place the night before. She will also find out that Keppie asked her father to pay the rental bill.

  She feels disbelief and amazement as she rounds the corner and enters the bunker’s main chamber. Light pours in from the Narrows, making the back-drop of diagonally stratified Signal Hill red rock look vivid, almost alive. The sea spa
rkles. In the middle distance, gulls follow an offshore supply boat that powers towards the open sea. A man standing on her deck raises his arm and waves.

  Everyone is there: Wallace and Geoff and the posse, all wearing white tuxes with lime-green cummerbunds that make them look like refugees from a Paddy’s Day parade; Nancy, beaming at Violet and looking voluptuous in a navy-blue halter-top dress, white piping down both sides; Keppie, in what appears to be one of Wallace’s maroon Adidas track suits; Devlin and Amy, both austere in business suits; some of the party gang from the 117 Patrick Street Collective, all of them looking suitably dishevelled; Violet’s boss, Igor, from the restaurant; her older sister Eva, and her older brother David. Violet squeals — she had no idea they were coming. Behind them stands her mother, heroic in a white gown that falls from her throat to her ankles. Her hair is scraped back into a bun, and she wears heavy gold hoop earrings. She’s so retro-1970s, Violet thinks, she’s back in fashion.

  Electrifying is how Violet will later describe the moment she turns and faces that gathering. In that instant, she says, all her preconceptions and her doubts were atomized. What she feels is the collective force of goodwill. These people, she understands for the first time, are more than family and friends — they are her life.

  They have transformed the bunker: the floor space is covered with a large circular rug, its red and earth tones picking up on the rust of the artillery piece that stands in the mouth of the pill-box. Violet knows that Wallace and Geoff are responsible for this touch. She mouths a thank you to Wallace, whose eyes fill with tears. It occurs to Violet that he loves her. She will soon love him.

  The walls are draped at intervals with silk screen fabrics emblazoned with birds and tropical fish. Suspended from the ceiling are tie-dyed sheets that have been roughly sewn together —Violet recognizes Nancy’s handiwork. She recognizes the sheets. At least two of them were on Nancy’s bed the day that Violet and Brian — dropping by to feed Nancy’s cat and water her plants — decided to seize the erotic potential of a strange futon and the bottle of baby lotion they found in the bedside table. She remembers the feeling of Brian’s back muscles slick under her hands, the slipperiness of his bum cheeks. She also remembers how pissed off Nancy was.

  Pots of nasturtiums and violet harebells hang from the walls. Standing on the floor, in a semi-circular cluster, framing the spot where Brian and the United Church minister stand, are tall glass vases filled with ferns and tiger lilies. When the wind blows in off the sea, the whole space sways and flutters with colour.

  Nothing prepares her for their exchange of vows. She and Brian have decided not to write their own. They think it too gauche — the kind of thing done on soap operas or at weddings where the groom sports a mullet and a powder-blue tuxedo, where the bride wears a headband and a dress that billows like soap suds out from below her washboard ribs. A day later, Violet can’t even remember their vows — they were something standard, she thinks: to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, ’til death do us part.

  She expects to feel embarrassed, expects to look into Brian’s eyes and see a glimmer of irony or the slightest elevation of his notoriously elastic eyebrow. She sees nothing of the kind. He looks so certain that he gives her courage. But he is not certain at all. His palm is sweaty and his grip is too tight when he reaches to take her hand. His voice has a slight tremor as he recites his vows. These are some of the things that make the scene believable to her; these and the fact that everyone looks at them as though they have made the right choice. All those present seem willing to step away from their hard-won positions and subscribe one more time to the shining ideal.

  Later, Brian will tell Violet that the atmosphere reminded him of the story of the apostles after the death of Jesus, the moment when, huddled in fear in some rented room, they are infused with the Holy Spirit. When he said this she just smiled. She chose not to say what she was thinking — once a Catholic always a Catholic. She didn’t want to ruin his buzz.

  Violet knows the experience was a false one, an illusion, and a pretty common one at that. Devlin says scratch a cynic and you’ll find a sentimental fool. Lying next to Brian in their hotel room that night, Violet understands that their plain sense has been hijacked by sentimental notions. Thank goodness, she thinks, for the sterility of that hotel suite. It somehow returns a critical edge to her thinking. She is suddenly glad she let her mother rent it for them. “We don’t want to stay in a hotel,” she argued. But her mother would not hear of them returning to their dingy apartment. She stressed the word dingy.

  Violet and her new husband spoon together under the striped coverlet, high on champagne and red hash. They both know they are in the grip of some kind of hysteria. They feel awkward. As far as she is concerned, getting carried away on the day’s proceedings has undermined the truth, has tarnished the fact that in their own minds they were already married, and had been since the morning, four months earlier, when Brian got up from his childhood bed, walked down the stairs to the stone-cold kitchen of his parents’ house, and phoned Violet.

  It was still night in Newfoundland. Violet had just returned home from The Ship Inn — not drunk for the first time in ages. In fact, she had been lying in bed thinking that she was finally starting to let go of Brian. For the first time since he boarded the plane and disappeared, she did not feel the pain in her stomach that flared whenever she pictured him. And then the phone rang. It was Brian, his voice, Irish and distant, following the black wire from his mouth to the red phone on her bedside table.

  “I miss you so much, Vi. I can’t stand it being without you.”

  She felt the air leave her body and rush back in. She felt the universe trampoline as if something heavy had fallen on its surface and begun to roll in ever decreasing circles around the dimple where it would inevitably come to rest.

  “Are you coming back?”

  “I’ll come back if you marry me. I love you, Vi.”

  “I love you, too.” Violet felt a moment’s hesitation. Afterwards, she told herself it was simply a reluctance to move back into the orbit of longing that she has just started to break away from. “Yes, oh-my-God. Of course I’ll marry you. Just get back here, okay?”

  Three weeks later, too broke to get a cab, she took the Metrobus to Bell’s Turn and walked the last mile to the airport. It was warm for June. By the time she got to the terminal, sweat was soaking into her Indian cotton dress and her ballet shoes were covered with white dust. One quick sweep across the arrivals lounge and she picked out Brian — his ramrod-straight posture, the way his head nodded as he chatted to an old lady he must have met on the flight. Violet watched him heave two suitcases off the baggage carousel and place them on the woman’s trolley. She let her eyes linger on his forearms, then on his long fingers. Her toes clenched involuntarily. She wanted to run over to him, but waited, deliberately delaying the moment when he would turn and look for her.

  Three months later, as they cuddle together in their antiseptic bridal suite, Violet feels they have somehow damaged, or if not damaged, at least clouded, the memory of that day. The enormous empty bed next to theirs stares back accusingly. Brian is kissing the back of her neck and running his fingertips delicately over her breasts, down over her stomach, then gingerly testing the elastic waistband of her underwear as though he is unsure about whether to go on, as though he has never gone there before. He is making her so horny.

  “I’m on my period,” Violet says. “I meant to tell you earlier but I couldn’t find the right moment.” His hand hesitates slightly before resuming its movement back up across her belly. She breaks out in goosebumps. She feels delirious, from the champagne, from the hash, from the excitement of the day, and now from his touch.

  Sounds and images keep flashing through her mind: the cheers and applause that filled the bunker as if the sea had come crashing in; the sight of her mother’s dress rippling around her shapely legs as she walked across the parking lot to their car; for some reason, the recent image of Nels
on Mandela walking away from the prison where he had survived for many years; her mother and Geoff doing an improvised tango in the living room of Geoff and Wallace’s house; Wallace looking on, grey-faced; Keppie and her dad drinking whiskey in the kitchen and singing sea shanties; her dad joking and telling legal horror stories all the way through dinner; her brother David’s consternation when the lobster he ordered came in its shell, not realizing that the bottom half had been removed and that he had only to lift the top to expose the meat, then wearing the shell on his head like a party hat once he had figured it out. The waiters and staff were not impressed with them. Not during the meal and not afterwards when Wallace threw up in the garbage pail outside the restaurant, while the chef, replete in tall white hat, watched with arms folded from behind the plate glass window. Then, at the last moment, as Violet and Brian shouted frantic goodbyes from the cab, Devlin ran up to the open window and pressed a generous knob of red hash into Brian’s hand.

  Violet presses her body hard against Brian. She feels out of control. It is partly the effect of the hash. She feels a wifely duty towards him — How can they not do it on their wedding night? People passing outside in the hallway laugh. For a second she imagines they are going to enter the room. She settles again. The long slow silk ribbons in her womb begin to unravel and smoothly slip. But all for nothing, she thinks. She knows that Brian is repulsed by the sight and smell of menstrual blood. “Poor guy,” she says, when she tells Nancy about their wedding night, “he married a gusher.”

  “We don’t have to do anything,” she says, arching her back and pushing it against him until she feels his erection fit neatly into the cleft of her bottom. “We don’t have to do anything,” she says, moving slowly up and down against him until he begins to move against her. For a moment she is turned on by the idea of letting him in the back door. It would not be so out of character for them, she reasons. After all, her role has always been the experienced one while his is that of the ingénue. It was she who took his virginity that afternoon in her residence room. She knew from his ham-fisted effort that day that it was his first time, but she pretended not to. Instead, she made him feel that his first thirty-second performance was champion.