“Have you forgiven her? I mean in your heart?”
“I’ve thought about it so much that I think I’ve stopped caring. I’ve more or less forgotten about it. Forgetting is better than forgiving. I love her.”
“So, no to the idea of forgiveness?”
“It was what she needed to do, so no. No forgiveness. None required.”
It hurt like hell to know Tulah was sharing her body with someone else when they made love so infrequently. He felt inadequate and insignificant and angry. His brain kept telling him that if this was what his wife needed, fine. But his heart was a mess. His heart was so hurt it couldn’t comprehend. He hoped it was just a physical attraction for Tulah, and not something messier.
Madame Chernakov leans back in her chair and takes a big breath. “Oh, my dear boy, you’re either incredibly enlightened, or in some sort of elaborate self-denial. Do you think this affair has anything to do with you and your extra woman?”
“You mean, was I hurt and decided to have an affair of my own, as payback?”
“Something like that, yes. Tulah’s affair was some kind of tacit approval for you to fool around.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t think I work like that.” Ray thinks about his extra woman, about Nancy. Why does Madame Chernakov insist on calling her that? He misses the simplicity of their love-making but also recognises it for what it was. It lacked substance. Nancy was a blonde-haired, Russian ghost. A lusty, vanished ghost.
* * *
Nancy is leaning against the railing looking out at the rolling grey sky. She looks directly down and shivers – an involuntary spark up the middle of her back. The temperature is dropping. It feels like snow and she is not dressed for snow. She thinks about the full-length fox fur in the front closet – a gift from the hockey player. It would be ideal right now but she does not have the energy to fetch it.
“So long, Ray,” she says. “Go home. I heard the feathers flapping again. I heard the wings. Go home.”
“You’re going to be fine,” Ray says, willing it, hoping it, commanding it to be true.
“I already am,” she says. “It’s just love. It’s just a silly game we girls play to entertain ourselves. I’m fine about everything.” She thinks about Slava. He would have made Ray suffer a great deal. He would have hurt him. Her stomach muscles tighten with the thought of her brother. To say she misses him does a disservice to the word, and she has not even begun to think about grieving. She wants to go back to the time they were fishing by the river in Kursk. She wants to catch her first fish and in the instant her brother is excited, Nancy wants to turn off time. She wants to live for a thousand years in that moment, in which her brother is pure and happy, and she is proud and giddy with joy. Of course, she would not know a thousand years are passing because there would be no time in that moment. It would all be true and real and unadulterated by time. Time can go fuck itself.
The line goes dead. Ray starts his car, shoulder checks and pulls into traffic.
Nancy watches as the small rectangle of his car moves down the block.
“It’s just love,” she says.
She is standing in the doorway of her bedroom and she is more than exhausted. She looks at the bed. There are a dozen unnecessary pillows, arranged perfectly, overlapping colour-matched squares. She pushes them onto the floor. She yanks at the sheet, slips under the covers and sighs heavily as she shuts her eyes.
1½
Escape
Maybe you met a woman on a ski hill once and as you were forced to sit with her in the lift, she told you a story about when she was on a high school band trip. The students are all staying in a gymnasium, boys on one side, girls on the other, and chaperones in the middle. One morning, one of the teachers gets up on stage early in the morning and plays the first few chords of a progression but doesn’t play the final chord. He waits a few minutes and plays it again. He plays a C chord, then the F, then a G, and then leaves it alone. He didn’t finish. He let the G hang in mid-air with no resolution. He keeps playing the progression and leaving that missing chord there like an itch not scratched. It is horribly unfinished. Students start to sit up in their sleeping bags and they are looking around the gym at other kids sitting up in their sleeping bags. The unfinished thing woke them and they are confused. One girl in the middle of the throng of sleeping girls stands up and screams “What the Fuck!” She storms up on stage, the teacher steps back, out of her way, and she finds the missing C-chord; the one that finishes the progression. Everyone in the gym takes a breath.
Perhaps, for the writer, the story of the Garamonds is like this unfinished chord progression. He has to finish. He has to see what that final chord feels like, and only then will he be able to take a breath.
* * *
The girl arrives, out of breath, with three bottles of Meursault. It is not a day that she would normally be there. It is not a wine the Garamonds would usually drink. It is an altogether unusual visit.
“These are from Monsieur Gauguin. I told him you do not partake of the white, but he insisted. I am sorry. It is what he gave me. He told me to hurry.”
“Thank you, Eloise,” Garamond says. He places his pen sideways on a stack of paper. He purposely slows his breathing.
“And the river is running high and so I struggled with my crossing…I am sorry it took me so long.”
“Thank you for your delivery,” he says. “I am sorry it was a difficult crossing. By how much time were you delayed?”
“I was turned back twice by the river.” Eloise sits down on the bench, her back against the outside wall of the villa. She is panting.
“Will you and Madame be needing me today? As you know, Monsieur, this is not my day for working, and my mother will want me back.”
“I think we’re fine,” he says. “You can go back to the village.” He is uncertain about Eloise. He is uncertain about her trustworthiness. He suspects Gauguin did not tell her about the purpose of her delivery because she shows no signs of knowing. The three bottles are a signal from Gauguin that there are men in the village asking about them. He sent the maidservant with the wine but did not let her in on the secret. This may be a symptom of Gauguin’s mistrust.
“You’ll be okay crossing the river? Do you want me to come and make sure you get across?”
“Without the weight of the wine, it will be an easier crossing on the way back,” she says. “Thank you for your offer but I will be fine.”
Was it Eloise who sent word to the Faculty of Theology? But why would she do this? Perhaps Eloise is their private summoner and she is calling them to stand up and be accountable for their sins against the Church.
When he is certain she is gone, Garamond finds Marie Isabelle. She is brushing her hair in the in the morning light. She is sitting in front of a mirror, her robe puddled at her waist. Garamond stops and inhales this image of his wife. She is the perfect stillness of a high mountain lake at sunrise. He breathes the new yellow light from the window on her skin and the peace of the room, and then he throws a jagged stone into the middle of the lake.
“They have come,” he says. “It’s time for us to leave.”
Marie Isabelle inhales sharply, turns to look at Garamond, and pauses to let this news sink in. She exhales and then she moves into action. They have bags ready to go, and provisions that are easily loaded onto packhorses. Garamond saddles the horses and ties them off to the corral. He pauses and looks around the small courtyard. He will miss this place. It has been an ideal retreat from the world and a fine place to work. They were happy here, and now they were venturing into the unknown. Gauguin had arranged a place for them, a shepherd’s hut on the side of a mountain near the Swiss border. He had warned them it would be secluded and hard, but safe.
In less than an hour, they are on the road, moving away from Allemond.
* * *
They stop at the edge of a lake to water the
ir horses and Marie Isabelle can’t hold it in any longer. “Was it Eloise?” she says. “Was it Eloise who made another confession to the priest in the village, and included our conversation as a sin?”
Garamond, who is checking the hoof of one of the packhorses, looks up at her. “Do you think this is possible? What conversation?”
“We talked about the mortal sin of fornication.”
“Has the girl committed this sin?”
“So she said. Oh, Claude, I fear I may have been too blunt. I trusted her. I wanted to trust her. I wanted to trust her decency and her intelligence and her common sense.”
“It’s okay,” Garamond says. “We’re going to be fine.”
“I caused this. I am the reason we are on the run again.”
“Enough.” He goes to her and pulls her close. She’s shaking. “If the girl did this thing, she was unaware of it. She did not know her confession would cause this.”
Marie Isabelle is crying now. “But how could her confession cause anything?”
She is talking about the Seal of the Confessional. Garamond thinks about the significance of breaking this seal – if a priest reveals a sin disclosed to him in the tribunal of penance there are serious consequences. He is deposed from the priestly office and sent into the confinement of a monastery to perform a never-ending penance. It is a gravely serious matter to break the Seal of the Confessional, and yet there were men asking about them in the village. Someone talked to the Church. It could have been one of the villagers, or someone passing through who heard about a punch cutter living in the forest, or the priest, who heard a confession. Someone talked to the Church and the Church came looking.
Chapter 1
the Tilt-O-Whirl of Us
Tulah Roberts looks at her husband, who is leaning over his coffee mug protectively. “I don’t want to be your friend anymore,” she says. “I don’t want to be the mother of your children. And I don’t want to be your life partner.” It’s Saturday morning. The clock on the stove reads 7:42 a.m. They are in the kitchen having coffee together. The girls are still asleep. Ray was just going to stand up and play some music but Tulah causes him to stay where he is.
It’s a little early for this, he thinks. “Okay,” he says. “You have my attention.”
“Good.”
“So what’s this about? What do you want to be?”
“I want me to be more than enough for you. I want to be your wife and your lover and enough.”
“Okay,” Ray says carefully. “You’re more than enough for me.”
“No, it has to be more than just saying it.”
“I mean it.”
“It has to be more than you saying it and then saying you really mean it. We need a renewal,” Tulah says. “I want to feel really in love with you again. Do you think that’s possible?”
Ray smiles. “You feel out of love right now?
She bites her lower lip. “I don’t want to sleep walk through my life, through this marriage. I want disruption and chaos and love.”
“I do too.”
Tulah leans forward and places her hand on his. “So, let’s decide to fix it.”
“Please tell me you’re not considering trust exercises in some therapist’s office?” He pauses. “Do you want to get married again?”
“I wasn’t going there but getting re-married isn’t a bad idea. We can re-write our vows. Make them suit us. Adapt them to now.”
“I would marry you again. But before that, I’d like to understand us again,” Ray says. “I’d like to know how we’re going to move forward. I’d like the design of it. Some of the small details like the font and the font size, and whether or not we’re one column or two, but also the big picture – the theme, the vision. You know.”
Tulah smiles. “We’re not a corporation, Ray.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant an agreement that looks backward and forward, but mostly looks at the present. Maybe it’s as simple as disruption and chaos and love. Or love, respect, and honour. Or love, whimsy and playfulness. Maybe it focuses on the details of the present.” He hopes a reframing of them might distil to a few basic principles and if they can work on these things, everything else will fall away.
“I like the idea of having a theme for us,” Tulah says.
“The theme of us. The theme park of us.”
“Yes,” she says. “We have to discover new ways to connect.”
“I’ll meet you in the theme park of us, right next to the merry-go-round.”
“The Tilt-O-Whirl,” Tulah says. “I love the Tilt-O-Whirl. Meet me at the Tilt-O-Whirl of Us and you’ve got a date.”
He’d love to suggest Madame Chernakov. She would know what to do. She could look at ‘completely botched’ and see a way to make it work again. She could convince Humpty Dumpty to smarten up and get his shit together.
“I’ll meet you on the Tilt-O-Whirl of Us,” he says. “I’ll be there.” Ray loves the idea of a Tilt-O-Whirl because it’s a grounded carnival ride that constantly surprises. It seems innocent and tame but it can really toss you around. And there are unexpected moments when it is just delightful.
* * *
Ray wakes up nauseated and slips out of bed. In the bathroom, he sits on the edge of the tub and looks at the toilet. He contemplates his stomach and if he is actually going to be sick or not. He swallows, and swallows again, and then swallows again. After a few minutes of indecision, he decides no, he’s not really feeling sick to his stomach.
In the kitchen, he opens the fridge and looks inside. There’s a half-bottle of chardonnay in the side door and he decides this is an appropriate drink for 4:45 a.m. He fills a coffee mug with wine and steps out onto the front veranda. He places his wine down and goes back inside for a jacket. Maybe he should have made a coffee, or tea.
The chickadees are flapping and fretting in the pine, zooming in and out of the tree, having breakfast. Ray does not want to think about anything. He just wants the birds, the trees and his mug of wine. He does not want to think about Nancy. He has spent altogether too much time thinking about her in the past year. He takes a gulp of the wine. He should tell Tulah he has been distracted, and maybe a bit preoccupied, but he is not distracted anymore. Oh that’s perfect. ‘Distracted’ as a euphemism for ‘fucking around.’ Beautiful. He will not tell Tulah about Nancy – not directly. He will carry that burden himself. It would solve nothing to be forthright. Tulah knows he is far from perfect. She knows they have been horribly detached. He will swallow Nancy and move forward. He will acknowledge his guilt and dishonesties, and turn toward the hard places – the places where there is work to do. He will try to forget the hellish phone conversation that threatened to never end – and he will count himself lucky that she was finally, after four hours, fine about things. He will open himself to happiness in whatever form it wants to take. He will be happy with Tulah. They will be happy again.
Ray is cold. He tries to light the deck heater – a tiny propane heater that only takes the edge of the cold away – but it won’t light. The hollow metal clicking sound of the starter cuts into the morning but Ray can’t get it going. He knocks the propane hose against the deck floor a couple times, in case there is a blockage, but the heater will not light. He tries to light it with a wooden match to get the smallest of flames going, to somehow draw out the propane, but there is nothing.
* * *
Madame Chernakov does not offer him a mug of coffee. She pours it and places the mug beside his chair without asking. Despite thinking he would not tell her about the long conversation with Nancy, he does.
“Nobody wants to be alone,” she says. “We humans will put up with a lot to avoid being alone.”
“Do you mean to say alone? Not lonely? Because I’ve always made that distinction.”
“I mean alone, and lonely.”
“So we will tolerate being mi
serable and unhappy, just so long as we are not alone?”
“Oh, my dear Ray, are you just now realizing there is no black? There is no white? It’s all grey, my dear.”
“So, I will be a little bit unhappy sometimes but I won’t be alone?”
“We are all damaged,” she says. “It’s life. Do you feel okay about it being over? Are you okay?”
“Yes. It was hard. I should never have answered that call. But yeah, I’m okay.”
Madame Chernakov looks away. She watches the clouds moving in the upper corner of the window. She listens to the creaking of the water pipes as they try to push heat into the building. She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she turns to face Ray. “And Tulah?”
He thinks about the kinky door Tulah opened the other day in the bathroom of that restaurant. A small shiver moves up his spine. “She wants to work on us. She wants some sort of renewal.”
“Do you think this is a good idea?”
“Of course. I love her. I think anything that smashes us together is brilliant. Call it what you want…” Ray pauses and looks hard at the therapist. “But I don’t want Bob and Bernice Fuckwad from Illinois who run touchy-feely couples’ retreats for folks who want to rejuvenate their marriages. You see, Bob and Bernice Fuckwad from Illinois found each other on Christian Mingle Dot Com and they were featured on Oprah in 1993, and they have all the touchy-feely answers to a happy marriage. I don’t want all the pat answers. I want real guidance. I want some sort of wisdom about this.”
Madame Chernakov giggles. “Jesus, Ray,” she says. “Sometimes you amuse me. I can recommend some therapists with integrity, and honour.”
Ray thinks about bearing witness. They have been witnesses to each other’s lives and sometimes when you are witnessing, you see things you wish you hadn’t. But you do not look away just because it’s unpleasant. You hear things you wish you hadn’t. You feel ugly things and sometimes say ugly things. These are only the trees and a marriage is a forest.
This Is All a Lie Page 33