Juliet Was a Surprise (11 page)

Her angel's mouth was breathing an inch from his ear.

“Peter, I've also wanted to tell you that you really—you really—need to shower more often. I've been meaning to say something.”

“I smell?” He pulled his cheek away from hers. “That's—” He was unable to look at her. “That's been me?” His hold on her shoulders softened. The glorious warm spray had become mere water. It was a world going limp.

Lily pulled back to reassure him at arm's length. She smiled so beautifully that Peter could only believe all she said.

“Look, here we are. Lovers have to be honest. Don't we?” She stared at him, naked and smiling, and he was an empty baby. “Isn't this okay?”

“Yes.”

“It's nothing. It's a small thing.”

“It's fine.”

“There's always soap!”

“There's … never not soap.”

“It's even funny. Uncle Ray,” she said, skewing her mouth to signal a joke and shaking her head fondly, “he called it ‘a deal killer.' Well, look how wrong he was.” She did so, taking in the proof of the shower, the walls, even the ceiling, and then their feet.

“Uncle Ray.” Peter shook his head as if fondly too. “He's a unique
kind
,” he said, boldly letting the oxymoron stand.

They came together and kissed, Petterick's first. And as he rose again to delirium, apparently Darwin's main signal of success, he noted the knowing dance of their lips and tongues, a wet and glorious language that was very much beyond him.

Geriatric Arena Grope

W
hen Vera Barnoff got home and in the door her phone stopped ringing, then almost immediately started again, so she knew it must be something important. Her heart flipped in the foolish hope it was the doctor's office with glorious news that they'd mixed up the lab work and she was fine. But it turned out to be good news anyway—she picked up to learn her daughter, Lise, had scored three tickets for tomorrow night.

Lise snorted when Vera used the word “scored”—sixty-seven-year-old mothers didn't use such words. Except they did.

“Well, happy birthday, Mom.” Lise paused. “So I'll phone Dad?”

“It'd be wasted on him.”

“He said he'd go.”

“That's different than wanting to go. Most people'd kill to go.”

Lise was silent, wouldn't give up on her father.

“Or, Lise? We'll scalp it!”

“Yes!” Lise wasn't serious, but into the spirit.

“For booze and drug money!”

She'd deflated her daughter again—mothers didn't talk about booze and drugs. Vera could've added that Leonard
Cohen himself was older than she was, had tried every drug known to man and chose a Scotch-guzzler for a guru. Her daughter had somehow missed the wisdom that it's okay to play, it really is. Though maybe she wasn't as stiff with her friends. But God, she wasn't even forty.

“Thanks for doing all that work, dear.” She knew Lise had had to bypass Ticketmaster, among other nefarious and complicated things. She'd probably spent lots of money.

“Mom, no, I love this too! Did you read the review?”

“Which one, dear?” Vera had been reading them all. He was roaming the continent. Leonard was coming to town.

“I don't know but it said he
skips
off the stage, between sets.”

“It'll be fun.”

“The first note of ‘Hallelujah' I'm going to be crying.”

“It'll be fun,” Vera said again. It would be. Lise's enthusiasm sounded real, and for decades Vera had never not been buoyed by the sound of her child's excitement. She believed it was in the tone of voice itself and was neurological. An electric signal to a mother's brain, pulsing,
All is for the moment right
. Life was simple sometimes. For the moment, she could feel in perfect health.

LISE'S GAMBITS TO GET
Vera and Mac back together were touching. She'd been at it ever since learning they were meeting again for lunches and even a few dinners. Dates, Lise liked to call them. Once Vera had told her that she and her father had “hooked up” the night before and Lise did a comic shudder, but it might have been real.

Lise understood what had happened nine years ago because they told her everything. Mac had had an affair with a rather young substitute teacher at the high school where both he and Vera taught—Mac English, Vera biology. Vera told Lise that though her father's affair coincided with his forced retirement at sixty-five, a psychologically difficult time for him, it was no excuse. Vera stayed on at the school, where everybody knew, and it had meant “the death of my pride.” She explained further that it was animal pride, the kind that does not heal.

So Lise understood why they'd separated nine years ago, but during that entire time she'd been eager for the merest hint of reconciliation. Not long after they sold the house and bought their separate condos, Lise informed Vera that according to her pedometer, she and Mac lived barely eight hundred steps from each other. Lise shared this fact with a wry smile, the same smile she would probably use to say, “You still love each other. Quit pretending.” This year Lise had one of her own two children graduating from the high school Vera and Mac had both retired from, but she still acted the hopeful child of a broken home.

Lise, darling Lise. Vera remembered how Mac let her name their child Lise, Vera's desire being to grab something French Canadian. Something of Montreal. She still thought it her hometown, could still conjure the smell of any given season, as well as certain alleys.

MAC CALLED HER
that night pretending to be mad. “How do you know I wouldn't kill to go?” he said.

So it was clear how much detail Lise had betrayed. Just as she told Vera that Mac had asked her why someone her age would go see Leonard Cohen if she wasn't being paid to. Mac was always being funny. Or, at least, was always not serious. It was hard to know what to call his constant light mockery of everything, including himself. Last week he'd told Vera his autobiography would be called
Canoeing in Azkaban: My Fictiony Life
. Only later did Vera get that it referenced not the Middle East but Harry Potter.

“You don't like Leonard Cohen,” Vera said into the receiver.

“Actually I do.”

“You've told me you don't. I have his music and I remember—I remember clearly—you yanking it off at a party.”

“He's not party music. I'd yank ‘The Volga Boatmen' off too.”

“He's uplifting.”

“So's a choir. A choir can't party either.”

Mac had her smiling a little. For some reason, this firmed up her decision not to tell him the news. It could wait. Mostly, she didn't want Lise to know, not yet. And it still might be nothing. The doctor called them shadows.

“Anyway, I do want to come. I need to protect my women from the Great Seducer.”

“It's up to Lise. She got the tickets.”

“The only Canadian in history who tries to fuck everything in sight.”

“Stop.”

“I won't go if you don't want me to go.”

“Fine. Go. Come.”

“You know I saw your big droning Leonard way back when?”

“No, you didn't.”

“Well yes, I did. Amsterdam or—”

“You would have told me this.”

“I probably did tell you. Probably a hundred years ago.”

“Really?” She recalled having arguments about Leonard in the past, and you'd think that during one he'd have mentioned seeing him live, if only to use as leverage, as he was doing now. Or was it possible that this was an old man's long-term memory kicking in, as they said it would? The old bag tipping over, spilling the long-lost shiny bits? The childhood hamsters and bicycles?

“It was Amsterdam, I think. It was outside. There were screamers and the sound was horrible. That's all I remember. But, Vera? Screamers? For a poet? And shitty sound, when the only important thing is the words?”

Words were not the only important thing. She was more convinced now that Mac didn't appreciate Leonard.

“Anyway, may I come?”

“You may.”

“But now you have to ask me nicely.”

They hung up eventually and Vera wasn't angry with him. He well knew that Leonard was her unassailable all-time favourite, and that to insult him was to mock her. She saw where it came from: Mac was biologically compelled to attack Leonard because both men were seventy-four. Mac didn't see a
beautiful man, poet, singer, sufferer. He saw a rival. This didn't make her think less of him. Boys would be boys. Vera supposed she was glad her ex still had some juice.

SHE KNEW SHE WOULDN'T SLEEP
, and she didn't. She moved from bed to recliner and back, and the night passed not too horribly. Other tests were pending. She could hear the calm voice of the young oncologist, who had even risked a joke. After describing for the second time a long list of possible options and outcomes, he paused, hefted her ever-thickening file, eyed it wickedly and said, “Or maybe we can bore it to death.”

The worst came around 3 a.m. Sitting in her chair watching figure skating, she suffered a bout of self-pity possibly triggered by the girls' youth and bodies, and she cried for minutes. When she emerged, she had a clear understanding that she would tell no one anything until her news was certain.

Between trips into her bedroom to tempt unconsciousness, she distracted herself with cups of chamomile and her “meditation walk,” where she held a small crystal ball in cupped hands at belt level and walked slowly but aimlessly, with a purposefully open mind, trying to be a big version of the crystal. Despite these measures, not only fear but memories swelled. About Mac, and about his affair. For this she blamed the Leonard disc she'd put on, as songs of love naturally kindled thoughts of it. Mac, she loved. And hated. It still felt that simple. Her name was Trisha. Vera had met her. She was no beauty, beyond the kind automatically bestowed by two fewer decades of life lived. It had lasted just three months. But sex
was
love. Leonard knew
this. Not many men did. Which made it tragic, which made it a poem. Mac didn't know, he'd called it a lark, he'd called it a desperate flight from age. But it had been love, because he'd wanted it to be love. Men always wanted it to be love, even if they wouldn't admit it to themselves.

Vera took the music off on her way to heat some milk, thinking about Mac mocking such poetry. Maybe the retired English teacher could be forgiven his arrogance. Mac had read so much and gave such thought to what he read so he could share those thoughts with his students. Under the surface glaze of irony, for over forty years he'd tried hard, nobly hard. All his efforts to slide what he called “the good stuff,” the iconoclasts— his beloved Beats, mostly—under the radar of the latest school board. He cared. She could so easily picture him standing tall up there at the front, gazing over their faces, cracking wise, having a worthy time. She was saddened by Mac's bitterness when he joked, “I taught maybe two percent of the kids I taught.” She'd countered that he'd helped many more to consider the weight of words. To which he said, “Okay, sure. Three.”

Vera stood, cupping her warm milk. She blew ripples onto its steaming surface, blowing a crust to the edge, where it rose and buckled, a thinnest bone. Because he thought too much, Mac couldn't hear Leonard's words. They were fire that melted contradictions. His voice the crucible. He was an alchemist, turning pain into beauty. Leonard used his own pain, you could tell. Mac didn't see the stick-thin boy, a human antenna who walked Montreal when it still hid pockets of the old country, a last bastion of fat mothers with flour down the vast slope of their chests, of men-only taverns for cigar-smokers with hats
and huge egos. A Jewish boy from a Catholic city, living his mature years under a Zen priest. Who loved to guzzle Scotch! Contradictions. The biggest one, that of men and women, a gulf he'd learned to cross with ease. Perhaps he was so wise a man because he was half woman. He would be lazy and selfish in bed, but hearing one word from you his eyes would clear, and deepen, and they would become a mirror. He would know the clitoris and where it rooted in your brain. And then he turned you into a song.

In her living room chair, she found herself sadly smiling. If she had the guts to say any of this to Mac, if he wasn't angered into silence he'd scoff up a storm. How could she tell him that, if Leonard seduced you, you could only be eager, because in sleeping with Leonard you were also, for the first time, sleeping with yourself? And that listening to him sing would be as close as she would ever get to that?

She padded to the kitchen to eat a banana, staring out the window with its decent view of the southern foot of Victoria, the strait, the Olympic Mountains beyond. At night, the city lights simply stopped at the pure blackness that meant water. That ancient night—how utterly lonely, and how much more powerful than the fragile lights, each of which could be killed with the flick of a finger. Or all of them with one storm. This city, all cities, would one day rejoin that powerful black. Full of spirit, or just black? What would Buddhist Leonard say to that one?

Finding an odd inscrutable comfort, she continued gazing out over the imagined water. Lately there'd been local resistance to the name change, from the Strait of Georgia to the Salish
Sea. Victoria was so fucking British. Mac's own mother— startlingly flat-chested, posture of a flagpole—would have been angry to know they were going to see a Jewish singer, one who had enjoyed a string of women. Vera could see her snort of disgust.

NEXT AFTERNOON, SHE
jigged balsamic into the tabbouleh, laid a sprig of mint on top, snapped a lid on the bowl and slid it into the fridge to chill. Predictably, Vera's sleeplessness now felt like she rode an iffy raft down an unknown river. Lots of energy but it all might topple and sink. Soon Lise would arrive with her father, whom she'd pick up on her way and drive him those eight hundred steps. Vera had decided not to tell them their dinner was Leonard-themed. It was silly guesswork anyway. The man's favourite nosh might be pork roast for all she knew, or more likely he'd gone vegan, propped up with coffee and Scotch. She just based it on where he'd lived. The bagel chips and cream cheese and kosher dill appetizer plate was obvious. But then the tabbouleh and grilled lamb loin with lime juice and coarse salt. Some Ben & Jerry's pistachio for dessert, and Turkish coffee. Good California merlot throughout, though Mac was down to a single glass at a time and Lise was driving.