When Jane’s beauty left her, she still had the pianoforte, and her skill at it was extreme, sublime. Her fingers were precise if arthritic; and when she played it was as if a tremor rippled through me, as if she were revealing some hidden part of the divine plan, some especial function of grace that I had never been privy to. And I would listen to her, sometimes, and we would speak, sometimes.
“I do not understand why you have come,” she would say to me.
“It is my purpose to discover your secrets, that I might see the truth of you and write it in Heaven.”
“There is no truth to me that you have not seen,” she would say, “for I have no pretensions to that sort of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man, and as such I have laid bare for you whatever you ask.”
“Ah,” I would exclaim, “what I search for is the parts of yourself that you do not yet, and may never, understand; for that is where the true character of a woman is written, not in what she knows she can reveal and does however willingly, but in what she is unaware of, even in herself.”
“Then you assume I do not know myself.”
“No mortal can.”
“And yet I have made a study of it, these long, lonely years, a perfect study so that I could paint a likeness of myself for your Book that, I have no doubt, would be suitable to your purposes.”
“What would you say?”
“That I am a woman.”
“That would not be enough.”
“It was enough for Eve,” she would say, “and it is enough for my husband.”
“It is not enough for you.”
It is said that in Heaven there is an order to things, and we angels understand it perfectly, that we lack the requisite means to question, those of us who stayed, that is, who did not fall in the War. And so I did not question when Azrael came to me, no longer resplendent, the crack of cannon fire gone from his voice.
“They’ve taken me off Warfare,” he said, and his voice was melodious and sad. “They say that I do not understand the New Order, that I am a cog in a perfectly ordered machine but, perhaps, it is the wrong machine, not the machine of Warfare. I don’t even know what that means,” he confessed, “but one of them, one of the dying ones, asked for a sign. And so I appeared to him, I let him see that God’s love was infinite and that he was safe, and that flesh was just a little thing, just a very little thing, and he had a place in the cosmic order. That God was merciful.
“Did you know that they have a Book? And in that Book are the names of the angels—everyone one of us? And it says, Azrael—a good servant for many years. For many years, what does that mean? Am I not eternal? Am I not free of flesh and beyond the scope of Time? For many years. And one of them found me. He said to me, ‘Azrael, you are made to serve.’ And I was. I am. I live to serve, service is the very truth of what I am, that’s what I told him. ‘Good,’ the little bugger said.”
Jane never lost her beauty; let it not be said by anyone that she lost her beauty, for Beauty is an eternal thing, like Truth, and there can be no changing it once it is possessed.
And I said this to Azrael, as he stood by me, I said, “Is she not beautiful, is she not possessed of some higher substance? Does she not deserve something more than that clod of a husband? What a noble mind, what a keen observer of the human condition, what a record-keeper of all that transpires in the hearts of those who surround her.”
And he said, “I was made to serve just like you. This is what they have asked of me, it’s not cannons, it’s not thunder and death, but it’s what they asked me to do.”
“Let me speak with her.”
Let us say that she was sitting at her desk when he came for her; let it not have been the pianoforte where she had laboured, for hours, for the love of a husband who did not love her in return. Let us say that there was no husband. Let us say that she was only passably good at the pianoforte, and that she had, instead, a keen fascination with words, with writing out the hearts of men and women upon the page. Let us call her, not Missus Bigg-Wither, as she herself might have done, but Miss Austen, alone, yes, but beautiful and keen-witted and happy.
Perhaps she would have heard a tolling of a bell, as some do, and she would have turned to see a stranger standing before her, tall, resplendent, with hair as soft as lamb’s wool. Perhaps there would have been a rushing noise in her ears, the sound of a great cataract, more deafening, perhaps, than the crack of a cannon.
And he will have said to her, “Fear not, madam, that I should disturb you at this late hour, for I have come with tidings.”
And she will have been shocked, but that stubborn grace to which she was born will have steeled her resolve, and she will have said, “Indeed, sir.” And he will have said, “You are to die.” And she will have said, “That is known. For is it not that every woman on God’s earth is appointed an hour of death?” And he, with a terrible smile, though not terribly meant, of course, but frightening, nonetheless, to a mortal, will have said, “Yes, Miss Austen. That is so.”
Afterwards, I would say to Azrael, “Why pillars of salt and punishment? Why manna in the wilderness and the twelve plagues of Egypt? Why sadness? Why death?”
And he would shrug, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know, mate.”
They say, in Heaven, that there is a Book, and in it are written all the names of the universe, that an accounting can be made of each. They say that beside the name of Azrael it is written, He was a good servant. And I know it to be true. And there will be another name, Harris Bigg-Wither, and there will be a very brief account, and there will be another name, Jane Austen, and it will say, She was very beautiful and died too early. Let her fondness for words have never stinted, let her books last for generations, let them be written as truth in the hearts and souls of the generations to come; let her never have feared the footsteps on the hall, let her have known much love, let her have disliked the pianoforte. I do not know if it is a kindness, these things I have written. But it is a record. Of a sort.
They say, in Heaven, that Time is infinite and all things happen at once, that there is no order to events; that there is no such thing as music for all notes sound together and the listener cannot differentiate; music is temporal; music is of the flesh; it is mortal. In Heaven, they say, there is no grand sweeping narrative, for God stands outside the possibility of such things; that He sees all things, the loves, the triumphs, the betrayals and reversals in a single moment, an eternity that renders as chaos for his servants what is perfect order for him. They say that His forgiveness is absolute, his His love is absolute, His observance is absolute. They say this, my many detractors. Let it be a jest between us; let it be the first betrayal; let it be a mark, spilled ink, in that perfect chronicle of His that I should believe otherwise, that I should doubt, that this doubt should run through to the very depths of me.
In Heaven, there is a book, and in that book, there is a name: Lucifer, called Lightbearer, a good servant, once, turned rebel.
the audit
SUSIE MOLONEY
Poor Janet lay in bed listening to the alarm, trying to ignore it and knowing it would never, ever go away. In the first few blinks of waking up she had nudged at Les, curled up on his side beside her. When he slept on his side, he didn’t snore as badly. She nudged him and felt his body roll with the force of it, but otherwise, gave no other response. She was about to speak Les get up time for work when she remembered that Les wasn’t working these days and then the day ahead washed over her and her stomach tightened and any thoughts of sleeping in or not getting up were lost in churning waves of stomach acid and tightened shoulders.
I’m being audited.
The alarm kept up its tinny shriek, a cross between bells and a rattling aluminium door. It sounded just like one of those wind-up alarm clocks of the sort that she remembered in her parent’s room from when she was a kid, but it wasn’t. It was a plug in. The wind-up clocks wound down ev
entually, and after a minute of the ringing, you could go back to sleep. If you could stand a minute. In January you could; when the floor was cold and the car had to run a full fifteen minutes before you could drive it without stalling, and if the coffee had to be made and if you forgot to make your lunch for work before going to bed, you could stand it. Probably you could stand two minutes of ringing if it meant not putting your bare feet on to the cold January floor. The plug in alarm didn’t run down. It rang until the little button was pushed. It was Les’ mom’s old alarm clock. She gave it to them when Jan complained about Les not getting up for work. The clock was procured like magic, practically out of a hat. Les’s work record embarrassed his mom. They fought about it all the time. When he wasn’t working, they avoided his mom’s place.
Les-than-a-man. That was what Jan’s mom called him.
It was all the way across the room. To shut it off, you had to get out of bed. You couldn’t even crawl to the end of the bed and reach out to the dresser and shut it off. He’d done that too many times. They started to put it on the chair in the corner. Something about the chair made it sound louder too. It’s the acoustics, Les-than-a-man had said, grinning. Makes the chair vibrate with it.
Janet didn’t know if that was true, but it did seem louder.
“Shut off the fucking alarm,” Les mumbled from under the blanket. Jan was already half-way out of bed by then, so she didn’t say anything back. The bedroom was freezing. They all but shut the heat off at night save a little dough, Les said. Les-than-a-man.
It was 5:30. She had five hours to get her shit together before her meeting with the government accountant. She was being audited.
I’m being audited. Jan thought it to herself as she pushed in the little button on the back of Les’s mom’s alarm clock in hopes that the words would lose some of their power, the power they had held over her for the last two weeks, but in spite of the two weeks that she had to get used to the idea, it all still made her stomach tight and sore and her head ache.
I’m just a dumb waitress, she thought. I’m a big nobody. What do they care what I have? She’d said this and more to everyone who would listen for the last two weeks, until Les-than-a-man told her to can it. She scuffled a foot under the end of the bed fishing for her slippers and found one and put it on. She got down on all fours to find the other one. Les had pulled it off her in a stupid gesture (it was supposed to be romantic or something but it had just been stoopid) last night when he wanted to have sex. She told him she wasn’t in the mood, but he said I’ll make you in the mood and then what was she supposed to do? But her slipper had gone flying.
He always did the wrong thing at the wrong time. Like mornings, when he slept instead of going to work.
The house was cold enough that she wrapped her robe around her middle tight and hugged her arms to her middle. She slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The first thing she did was turn the heat up. No way was she doing bullshit paper work in a cold house. Then she made coffee. Strong.
It was still dark out when she went down into the basement and started hauling boxes of receipts upstairs. She brought the first two up and even just the sight of them, with their box tops folded in on each other in a pinwheel felt so overwhelming that she decided to start with just the two of them and then work her way up to the other box, still in the basement, and then the assorted bags and folders with the other papers in them.
The boxes were from the liquor store, from when they moved. One was a Captain Morgan’s Rum box and the other a Canadian Club. Scratched out with black marker was the notation “kitchen” in her handwriting. Written under that was “tax shit,” in Les’s handwriting. Ha ha, she thought, Les-than-a-man. That’s what it was, though. Shit.
The coffee maker gurgled as though there wasn’t a care in the world that couldn’t be taken care of by Maxwell House in the Morning, but it filled the kitchen with such a warm and homey smell, that Janet thought she might cry. It reminded her—the dark, the coffee smell, the tight stomach—of when she was in school. Her dad would get up and make coffee come on girls and then call her and her sister to breakfast. Her mom worked a night shift at a bakery and she slept while the three of them ate and mumbled quietly at the table before school and work. Jan hadn’t done well in school, mornings before she went filled her with a familiar, comfortable sort of dread, based more on the tedium of the long day ahead than any real fear. It wasn’t she was worried about failing a test, or a grade or getting a bad mark on a paper. She didn’t do well, and wasn’t expected to by either her parents or teachers. Sometimes it just worked that way. She left after tenth grade, not exactly with her parent’s blessings, but with a basic understanding that neither she nor school were doing each other any favours. She went right to work at a diner on Rail Road, making $3.25 an hour. She’d been a waitress ever since. And she was a damn good one. She even liked it. Her parent’s had her sister to be proud of. Betty had gone all the way through school and then, in a move that was incomprehensible to Jan, went on to more school. She was a medical secretary now, and worked at one of the hospitals in the city. She was married with two kids. Her husband was a mechanic. He made good money too.
But no tips, was their joke together. Not very funny, considering it was the tips that got her into this mess.
I could just kill Terri Pringle.
Janet had been waitressing for ten years. Never once had she claimed any tips. Not once. Ten years, ten tax reports filed, not once had anyone said fuck all about tips. Then she was talking to a new waitress, Terri Pringle, who said, in passing one day, that you had to claim your tips on your income tax.
“They’ll come after you, if you don’t,” she’d said. Terri worked part-time. She was a student at the community college and she had said the whole thing with such confidence that it shook Janet up.
Tentatively she had said to Terri, “I’ve never claimed my tips.” She’d tried to say it with as much mustered confidence as the younger, student-y Terri, but hadn’t managed as well.
“My dad’s an accountant,” she said. “They’ll come after you for that.” Then the shift had changed and everybody went home. Terri didn’t even work there long.
Jan had asked around after that. She asked the other waitresses and they would sigh and the debate would start, but most of them said they never claimed their tips. One girl said they automatically assume tips on top of your wages. “Ten per cent,” she said. “Look over your last year’s return. Where it says: undeclared income?’ Look there. They’ll have added ten per cent.”
They hadn’t. Her mother and dad said not to worry about it. “You get it done at the H and R Block, don’t you?” She did.
“They do it for you there.” But her mom had looked a little frowny over the whole thing you don’t want to do anything to get into trouble, she’d said later, when they were alone.
Don’t be such a putz, Les-than-a-man said. “Declaring your tips would be like when we borrow ten bucks from my mom and then declaring it as income.” He laughed at the very thought and then watched TV. He reminded her, though, when they were going to the H and R Block to get their taxes done. Don’t be a putz, he’d said, and he shook his finger at her and raised his eyebrows in a perfect imitation of his mother when she said to him, You get a job now, you hear? Don’t be a bum like your father.
In the end, she declared her tips. Or at least, a rough estimate of them. The H and R man had raised his eyebrows, too, and Jan had trouble deciding whether that was because she was claiming them, or because the number was so low, or too high. Her face had reddened and she felt like she’d been caught in a lie, but of course she had no real way of knowing if she was lying or not because Terri Pringle—I could kill Terri Pringle—hadn’t even mentioned declaring tips until nearly October. Jan had guessed based on what she made from around November-mid when she decided inside her head to play it right to the end of the year. She thought she was safe in her guess
because people tipped more around the holidays, and she counted them.
She poured coffee into her bunny mug and got down on her hands and knees on the floor in front of the first box. She cracked it open, not knowing even what year she was about to see, let alone whether or not it would be her stuff or his. Les had a business on the side sometimes, fixing bikes. His stuff was mixed in with hers, but he only claimed the money he made working extra for his buddy Tom, who had a bike shop, because Tom declared it.
The box was filled to the top with little pieces of paper. A musty smell came from the box, like old books at a garage sale. A couple of little pieces fluttered up and settled back down, like fall leaves when you swipe by them on your bike on the way to school. Thinking about school set her off again. She wanted a Tums, but she’d eaten the last of them the night before.
Gee-zus.
Her and Les were both savers of paper. Paper had some kind of authoritarian hold over her feral self. Paper made her feel more feral than human, or certainly sub-human in some way. Especially white paper. Around very white paper with lines and numbers or words on it, she felt stained and dusty and smudgy. The lines, even and black or blue, the careful tally of numbers in a row, the dots matching up with each other, they seemed like representatives of some kind of legal authority. She also felt this way about soldiers and policemen, doctors and dentists; pieces of paper felt like they could boss her, regardless of what was written on them. Could as easy be a receipt from the drugstore for tampax as a subpoena, didn’t matter. Coloured paper wasn’t so bad. She kept the pizza flyers and the two-for-one deals that came from the carpet cleaning people, and ads offering her fifteen per cent off her next oil change, with a sort of grown-up sigh, and filed them in a pile on the table beside the front door. Anything that came in a white envelope (especially a white envelope with a little window on the front) went reverently over to the desk in the corner, where she paid bills. She even kept the newsletters sent by her member of parliament, just in case. You never knew. Someone might ask. Something.
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