Double Talk (10 page)

Violet understands now that he didn't disappear. He was there all the time. She just couldn't see him.

She stands behind her husband in the kitchen and listens to him singing along in his tone-deaf way with Fats Waller, “God help me but your feet's too big.” She loves how he is too shy to sing in front of anyone but her. She loves him. Then Brian turns and looks at her. And the expression on his face is almost enough to break her heart. She sees how unsure of himself he has become. He seems hesitant even to speak. Violet walks across the linoleum, arms held out wide, and hugs him. He half-hugs her back.

“What's this?” he says.

“I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for the way I have treated you over the last few months. It's been so hard. I love you, you know.”

“That's okay.”

Violet thinks he is looking at her a little sceptically. She feels a small flare of anger, but reminds herself he has a right to be circumspect. He shrugs, throws her a lifeline: “You were depressed.”

And just then, right on cue, Lucy starts to howl.

“Your turn,” Violet says. “I'm going to shower and then I'm going for a walk. You can try her on some formula if she gets hungry.”

“I thought you threw it out.” Brian is referring to a fight they had a month earlier, when he'd shown up drunk with a box of formula and insisted it was time they gave it a try.

“It's in the laundry room, on the top shelf.” Violet says.

Violet knows she is still depressed, depressed but on the rebound. Standing under the shower's twitching jets, she has a picture in her mind of crushed blades of grass beginning, with jerky movements, to right themselves. She feels at once a sense of reckless optimism and generosity.

Lucy is still crying next door in the nursery as Violet dries herself and dresses. Brian is doing his best to distract Lucy with his Donald Duck impression. Lucy stops for a few seconds each time he does it. A few seconds later she is shrieking again.

Violet sneaks down the stairs and puts on her coat. Stepping out the front door into the salt air, she feels loose, like her limbs are not properly screwed on. Too many months in the house, she thinks. She feels as though she has come through something important, though, if asked, she would not be able to say what exactly. Her mood is such that all of the ordinary sights of the Christmas season strike her as being poignant: the tatty Christmas decorations on the downtown streets; the office workers running around on their lunch-hours buying presents; the teenagers who need nothing but still stare longingly into shop windows; the bearded drunk on Water Street who asks her for eighty-three cents. She gives him a dollar-fifty. She is Scrooge, a month early.

It is warm for December, warm enough that she can smell the harbour's sewage bubble when she crosses the road at the bottom of Cochrane Street. She decides to walk through the Battery and up Signal Hill. Breast feeding Lucy has made her lose a lot of her pregnancy weight, but she still avoids looking at herself in a full-length mirror.

She walks quickly, concentrating on physical sensations: muscle sliding warmly over muscle; vein throb; haemorrhoid itch and sting. Yoga has taught her that the way to the mind is through the body. She makes a promise to herself to enrol in yoga class again. She passes through the Battery, without encountering any dogs. She is afraid of dogs. She passes the one-time fishermen's houses, now owned by artists, and the silvery wharves, now kept up as a tourist attraction. She passes Chain Rock, the one-time anchor point for a submarine net. She looks across at Fort Amherst, at the lighthouse and at the concrete bunkers. Feels a sudden craving for a cigarette. Only four years since their wedding and already it seems a lifetime ago.

Violet walks with a sense of imminence, certain in her movements though still unsure of her destination. Joni Mitchell's “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” is playing on her Walkman as she begins to ascend the one-hundred-and-one wooden steps to Cabot Tower. A phrase keeps entering her head: Baby Time. She can even visualize it: Baby Time™, followed by that little trademark symbol. But it's not until she stands on the summit of Signal Hill and looks out on the great expanse of ocean that she begins to understand. Mother Ocean. It is simple really, she thinks, she and Brian need to get on Baby Time™. She understands. This is what all of those smug young mothers and fur-top-ankle-boot wearing grannies were trying to tell her while she was pregnant. She reconsiders, decides they were angels, after all, and not the gargoyles she thought they were. She decides that to be a good mother she has only to live in a child-centred world. She needs only to stop being selfish. Violet wonders if she can turn this thought into an axiom.

Flushed with her new insight, Violet thinks about her best friend. Nancy knew instinctively how to mother. It is the reason Lucy is always better behaved for her. Violet knows Nancy will never look at her screaming baby and wonder if there is something wrong with it, mentally, something that eluded detection at birth. Nancy will not listen at the black hole of her screaming infant's throat and hear in it an existential complaint, a questioning about why she has been taken from non-existence and brought to live in such a hostile place. Nancy will never doubt her baby's trust in her. She will not think that her baby is judging her, finding her utterly inadequate. Nancy doesn't think this way, Violet knows, because she was raised by a mother who cherished her.

“We mother as we have been mothered,” she will later tell Nancy. “Simple as that.” Violet's mother promised to come during the final few weeks of her daughter's pregnancy. She promised to stay with her until after the baby was born. But at the last minute she called to cancel, telling Violet that her dad had a heart episode: “But no need for you to worry, dear,” she said. “I'm pretty sure it will be okay.” It turned out that she was right; he had simply suffered palpitations while playing the back nine with a group of government ministers. His cardiologist friends couldn't pin-point the exact cause of his event but thought it might have been dehydration. Violet guesses her dad hadn't cut his coffee with enough scotch before teeing off that morning.

Her mother and father said they would visit as soon as the baby was born, but reneged on that promise, too. They blamed their absence on Auntie Val, her mother's friend since childhood. They said she was in crisis over the failure of her fourth marriage. Violet's mother said that Val came home early one morning from underwater aerobics class to find Brent, her husband of two years, applying anti-wrinkle cream to a young man of Cuban origin.

It is always something with her parents, Violet thinks. She and Brian had seen them only twice in the four years since their wedding. And both times they had had to travel to B.C.

Violet arrives home from her walk around Signal Hill to find Brian gazing blissfully at Lucy, who is lying bundled up and fast asleep at one end of the couch. Brian is holding a bottle of formula, two-thirds empty, on his lap.

“She took a bottle for me,” he said, his face flushed. “It was amazing. She just sucked away on it and stared up at me with the most intense gaze. Wow. It felt like she was looking right into me.”

“No crying?”

“Not a peep.”

“How long has she been down?”

“Ten minutes, maybe.”

Violet is pleasantly surprised, though a bit peeved. Good for you, Brian, she wants to say. Good for you and poor me, because my breasts are full of milk. She knows it will be at least an hour before Lucy wakes up. Just the thought of having to wait that long makes her ache. Suddenly uncomfortable, she brings her hands up underneath her breasts to shift their weight and immediately feels her milk let down. It takes only seconds for it to soak through her nursing pads.

Slack-jawed, Brian points to the dark stain spreading down the front of Violet's blouse. The look on his face reminds Violet of the first time they tried to do it after Lucy was born. Violet didn't want to be on top, but it was the only way she felt comfortable. “God, I felt self-conscious enough about the extra pounds, the stretch marks,” she told Nancy, “without my breast deciding to spring a leak. Brought a whole new meaning to the word cowgirl, let me tell you.”

“Oh,” was all Brian said, as her milk stippled his chest, droplets hitting him in the face when Violet leaned across him to pull a tissue from the box on the bedside table. Violet remembers that he looked partly horrified and partly something else she couldn't name at the time, his eyes going black — like in those cheesy vampire movies when the living dead come in close contact with circulating blood.

“So, she really liked the bottle?” Violet says, reaching for a receiving blanket and pressing it to her breasts in an effort to staunch the flow.

“She was a bit fussy. I think, maybe, it was too hot maybe. But once I ran it under the cold tap for a while she was fine with it. It tastes pretty good, by the way. Formula, I mean. Like the milk you get at the bottom of a bowl of cereal. They say it's supposed to taste like breast milk.” Brian starts to blush.

Oh-my-God, Violet thinks. It occurs to her that he may be harbouring some secret wish to suckle her. She knows from reading birth literature that some men want that, and that some wives even let them. She also knows that women sometimes get pleasure from breast-feeding their infants, and that some even feel sexually turned on by it. In one notorious example, a mother of six reported having multiple orgasms every time she fed her baby.

But then her mood swings again and she is suddenly ashamed. She sees a more obvious and likely explanation for his wild association.

“You're not high, are you?”

“No. I'm not.”

It is the wrong thing to say. There is that hurt look again, she thinks. She sees that the bitch-from-hell approach is not going to work. She also realizes that she is being unfair to him. Just because she has decided to grow up that day doesn't mean that Brian has to be right there with her. She decides that she will have to take it gently with him. She knows it will take time to wean him from his bad habits, steer him towards a place where he can accept his share of responsibility. She knows he will have to come to it as if it were his own idea. Shattering his fragile ego is not going to help anyone. First things first, though, she thinks: he has to stop smoking so much dope. It makes him so listless. But she knows she will have to be patient. She understands that she is strong enough to carry both her daughter and her husband for a time. In fact, at that moment, invigorated from her long hike around Signal Hill, Violet feels invincible. She also feels beautiful for the first time in months.

“Come on,” she says. “Let's go upstairs. It's time we had a little mommy and daddy time.”

If Violet expects Brian to make some joking reference to
The Grapes of Wrath
, she is disappointed. If she expects him to jump off the couch like he did in the old days, she is in for a surprise. He looks uneasy, put upon almost.

“So you're in the mood again?” he says.

This is more backbone than he has shown in months, she realizes. Brian had wanted sex again soon after Lucy's birth, but after that one disastrous attempt, Violet repeatedly begged off, claiming that she was too tired or too sore. In fact, sex was the last thing she wanted. The impulse was just not there. She didn't care if they ever did it again. And she didn't care whether Brian accepted it or not. She can't even remember when he stopped asking. Freed from her nagging libido, Violet began to see her husband in a harsher light. She began to wonder why she had spent ten years of her life with him. Had he simply been her boy toy? It was obvious to her that whatever role he played in her life was made redundant by Lucy's arrival. Or so it seemed until the moment her desire for him returned.

Whoever said lust is no basis for a strong relationship was, Violet thinks, expertly clueless. Sex is never just sex, she knows, it's the cutting-edge of life. Sex has always been her connection to the world of men, and the world of men, despite attempts by feminist professors to rewire her instinct, is what really makes her run.

Standing in the living room, looking down at Brian, Violet feels a fierce and lascivious urge to unzip his fly and put her head between his legs. She wants to feel pleasure by giving pleasure. She imagines him lying on a bed of satin cushions, his fat cock pointing to the heavens. She will be his leaky concubine. She will be whatever he wants her to be. How could she have gone months without desiring him? she wonders. How could she have thought about him so callously? She feels ashamed at her betrayal. Here is a man, she thinks, who could stand anything except his wife's unhappiness, who agreed to have a baby even though he admitted that he wasn't really ready, who promised he would try.

“Okay,” Violet says, “I deserved that. I know that emotionally I've been all over the map. And you've been more than patient. I just didn't feel sexy with all that weight on. I still don't, really. And besides, you haven't looked all that interested either.”

“Fair enough, I suppose. But there are only so many times a guy can hear ‘No' before getting a bit gun shy.”

Violet feels tempted to make pouty lips and say, ‘Oh, my poor widdul baybeeee.' But she restrains herself. “It's my big fat body, the haemorrhoids, the stretch marks, isn't it?”

“No. It's not. Your body is beautiful. I'm in awe of what it can do. But that's part of the problem, Violet. Christ, how do I say this without sounding like a complete flake? I always thought of your body as mine, somehow. But after Lucy was born, it came in loud and clear that your working parts have another main function altogether. I suddenly felt like I was trespassing. To be honest, I felt like a bit of a pervert.”