Juliet Was a Surprise (7 page)

Juliet Prudhomme shaved nothing on her body. Her hair was a tawny-blonde and there wasn't that much of it. The hair on her legs was the same as on her forearms, in that you had to concentrate even to see it. In her armpits nested two cute tufts. I sensed the depth of her strangeness only when she undid the piled hair on her head and it cascaded down her back, uncut, certainly, for years and years. I could hardly breathe, let alone hold a brush, but I did what she asked. I brushed, shaking all the while, hoping she'd take my hand's tremor to be a little extra something I brought to my erotic art.

There in her bedroom, husband Troy at some bar, Juliet sat on the edge of her bed and I knelt, in only my boxer shorts, brushing her long, beautiful hair. She'd lift an arm and I'd draw the brush, once, twice, through her pit, the tines softly tugging through. When I did her legs she parted her knees so I could reach the insides of her thighs, and I encountered the vision I was born to behold. There, eye level, was the crux of my adventure and the spot at which she'd pointed. Edging out past a hem of pearl silk underwear was her humble rim of vulva, mounding demurely, in the sense that it couldn't help but mound. It too was graced with a fine, squirrel-blonde hair, also awaiting my brush. I could not think and my breathing was ragged. I don't know why, as I have limited experience in these matters, but her fine hair—its slight lustre, the arc of its uniform wave— suggested the essence, the
soul
, of Juliet. It was both how and what she communicated. I saw this and believed it as much as I would have the main thrust of a philosophy, had I one.

I'll say nothing more. I've described enough. Goodness knows I've described the brushing, and what followed, over
and over in my head. As I review this cycle of images it's like I'm strapped to a paddlewheel: I'm plunged under and come up drenched and choking but I can't wait to go under again. It's my private memory and it will last me my lifetime.

I was like a plant responding irresistibly to the sun, but at human speed. Picture, if you must, a gnomish man embracing utter beauty, clenching it with hands, legs, wrists, mouth—and leave it at that. Because the embrace, the fecund exchange, did take place. Twice, at my eager plea. After the second time, Juliet told me to be still as she listened carefully to the radio she'd brought into the bedroom so she could hear how much time was left in the hockey game. It would be over in ten minutes.

So she turned to me as I lay smug (I'm thinking now) on my pillow, and said something.

In our short time together she'd said other things too, of course. Before, during and after our embraces. She said I was “sweet,” and several times called me “sweetie.” After I'd performed a certain little something with my fingertips, moving them on her bum-skin as on the breakable membrane of a mushroom, she told me, “You're great at that.” Once she pressed my nose with her thumb, one of her little surprises that kept me reeling, that dug an instant hole under me and made me fall even further in love.

In love. There it is. In my life I have had almost no chance to give myself like that. To give my body. To bloom, as we were meant to. I have this body
in order for it to bloom
. Juliet!

Then she said that final thing. After checking her clock radio, then meeting my eye as inconsequentially as she would a passerby's on a rush-hour sidewalk:

“So that was all great, but now you have to get out. Don't ever come back.”

I watched Juliet's face for a smile. None came. It wasn't humour.

THE NEXT MORNING
I sat rooted in shock. After getting home I'd actually fallen asleep and slept fully. A drained husk, as it were. I woke with the birds and felt replenished, richly spunky again. Potent with confusion. I couldn't get her words out of my head. I counted them all, many times. The woman I loved had uttered either seventy-six or seventy-seven words to me, including the urgently mouthed
“Ten after seven”
at her front door. I did not count her pointing finger, her inconceivable jab at herself. How many words did that signal represent? How many theories? Books of philosophy?

I can explain that I wasn't seeing clearly. I felt bewildered— and now I see the perfection of that word. Lost in the wild! I cried and it made me feel better. Crying gave rise to all the possibilities, and their logic dried my tears. I saw that she might be in love with me too, and said what she
had
to say, painful as it was for her. Or, it could be that Troy was murderously jealous, and she said it to save my life, even while ruining hers.

I stood under a hopeful shower again. But whatever my thoughts, however they swirled, stroked or hit each other, I wasn't seeing clearly. How could I? And that's why what happened, happened.

To say that I almost didn't return to the Prudhommes', to my job with the deodara cedar, would be a lie. I am an arborist. In other words, I had two precious reasons to return, even if, that morning, they felt like one.

LIKE ALL OUTDOOR
tradesmen constrained by noise bylaws, I could arrive at my jobsite no earlier than five to nine. Troy had been busy on the phone, it seemed, because here was my competition climbing out of his bigger shiny white truck, “Petersen's Tree Service” in black Times Roman on the door, all the charm of a tax form. Under that,
Forty years in business
. I often saw Petersen's truck around town. It should have read,
Forty years destroying your trees without a moment's thought.
Petersen's monkey-boy sat in the passenger seat gulping coffee. He'd be scaling the tree to do the real work, topping the tree in sections and lowering them by rope to Petersen.

Petersen sat oiling a chainsaw on the truck's tailgate. He was big, and he had cut the sleeves from his shirt to reveal his formidable arms. But like many of the smaller species, I puff up when threatened. And perhaps my yellow aviators make me look capable of surprise.

“What's up?” I asked, trying at the same time to make my chainsaw look weightless in my hand, which means not letting it tilt me to one side.

“Not much.” Petersen didn't even bother looking at me. Which told me that Troy Prudhomme had said something.

“This is my job here,” I said. “The deodara. Gonna half-root it, heal it.” I dropped the “g” not through fear but as a peace offering.

“Um, we're buckin' it. They called.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Last night.”

“That's impossible.”

He looked at me blankly. I had one good lie ready. Old-growth activists use a tactic called “spiking,” where they drive hidden nails randomly into a random tree. A man wielding a chainsaw can be killed. Spiking just a few trees and making it known can save whole forests.

“There's no way they'd call you. It's been
spiked
.”

“No way.”

I stood slowly nodding.

“Who the fuck spiked it?”

“She did. The wife. Juliet. I guess she's just absolutely in love with—”

“
She
's the fuckin one
called
me.”

“Who called you?”

“She did. Mrs. Prudhomme.”

“When?”

“
I
don't fuckin know.”

“When?”

“I don't know, last night. Six? Said it was an emergency.”

“Six?”

I stood staring past him, at Deo, seeing nothing and everything. This last piece of evidence about Juliet did a quick job of flushing all life from me. It's why I did what I did. It wasn't rage, per se, it was panic. It was a last-ditch attempt to save my world.

I yelled a fateful noise, I started my chainsaw. I didn't nick Petersen—that's a lie. My blade missed his face by two feet, or
maybe one, but in any case he leapt back. Another leap put him in his truck, and I bet he nicked his own face on the way in. He jabbered to his monkey-boy as they sped away, the tailgate open and his chainsaw rattling and walking along its edge. The white truck gleamed in the sun as it turned a corner and was gone. I assume it was Petersen who called the police?

I don't remember going to the tree. To Deo, growling machine held in front of me. I do remember starting the cut because of the intense pleasure I took from her pain. And maybe, sure, maybe I was aiming the tree at the house. So in that sense it's true that I “used the tree as a weapon.” But if you only knew how few trees I've taken down in my life—almost none—and how rudimentary my cutting skills are. I have, at best, a sense that a tree might fall north as opposed to south. The question shouldn't be “did I,” but “could I.”

I cut. Barely used, my machine roared when unleashed, the teeth of its blade pristine and eager. I breathed smoke as creamyellow chips spewed against my legs and piled on my feet. Oh, the reek of cedar, the gorgeous, shrieking scent of its fresh blood, of its dying. Maybe the smell scraped my eyes, because I found I couldn't see through the tears. Her death took less than a minute, but in that time I could replay everything.

It was my Juliet who had called. My Juliet who, after our second embrace, had said to me, in bed, in slumbery amusement, “So, you really love that tree.”

I'd been giving her my thoughts, that
seeing
a tree was to behold its heartbreaking relationship to the sun. It was like God and supplicant; it was a successful religion. I spouted the usual, the stuff I'm no longer so wild about.

“You think trees are so special,” she said, six more words I thought she meant.

“More than that!” I exclaimed, obnoxious. I told her how blind we were to each plant's uniqueness, and that we should never call them by their species. “If we call that tree an oak, we'll see an ‘oak,' not
the living process of that single being
.”

“I thought it was a deo … deodo …”

“I'm using ‘oak' as an example.”

“Deodorant!” she said, not listening. She added, “Ironic,” in that singsong of hers, and I suppose she meant her sewer being broken by a deodorant tree. But I was breathless with my theories and growing breathless for another reason too, wanting embrace number three.

My monstrous chainsaw roared its triumph. The second before Deo leaned, shouting her orgasmic final crack to begin her fall, Troy appeared on the cute little deck that issues from their bedroom. Had I aimed the tree at this bedroom? Who knows. You won't believe me, but I do think it was the tree's aim more than mine. Deo had been aiming herself all her life. So had I. So had Juliet, and Troy. It's why we love trees—we see ourselves in the rooted and the helpless.

Troy tried to catch Deo. It was so pathetic and hopeful a move that it made me like him. His arms raised to the sky were a cuckold's arms—that is, a lot like a child's. Twenty Troys couldn't have caught that tree's tons, twenty Troys couldn't have protected Juliet, who yet again lay languishing post-coitus in her bed, a bed she had shared with exactly one too many.

I'M TOLD JULIET'S
in a coma. Am I sorry?

Troy, apparently, will walk again. Shoulders heal, as do vertebrae. He'll wear his facial scars proudly to English class and 'Nucks games. No, I'm not sorry. For I can say that I'm seeing more clearly now. I see, for instance, that Juliet is still in control. No, she's not faking her coma. She's not a possum. But I do know she's an animal, hiding and in wait.

I can see how I've changed. Though it might have come through in my explanation, you'll be surprised at the new me, especially when you hear me say: Any forest seen from orbit is a carpet of breeding mould. At war with absolutely everything. Trees are shit. Trees,
all
plants, are shit. They are teased up,
tortured
up, by the sun. They fight each other for its light, squeezing out what competition they can. Green
is
envy. Texture is defensive and mean. Do you know how many pretty garden plants exude poison through their roots, and gasses through their leaves, to keep weaker plants small, and in the shadows?

Do your worst to me. It's expected.

I sometimes feel like a mushroom, not just because it eschews the sun. And not because a mushroom is the hobbit of the plant world. Anyone can tell by their shape and colour that they bulb about in a blind and comic hell. Mushrooms are twerps. Some are dangerous. Good.

I could go on, but no more explanation is needed. Look at me. Now look at Juliet. Even in a hospital bed, Juliet has me beat. Even now she has someone in there tending her hair, as it were.

Tumpadabump

C
hantal stops the taxi five blocks early, wanting to walk. Actually wanting not to walk, wanting this not to happen at all, this final dispersing of the will. She has not been this far downtown in months and she hates it. She believes she probably always has, the soulless glass towers and banal exhaust fumes. She wants home and its grand stone buildings, each as ripe with odd spirit as a human being; she wants the Seine's good stink.

But there is only today. With the doling out of Bill's assets, maybe he will exist a little less. Maybe this will help clear her head. Dr. Michel said that today's meeting “might unstick the glue. It might trip up the rhythm.” Those were his words. Also, “Maybe he'll stop seeking your attention.” Dr. Michel was a bit of a
caricature
getting her to come here today, excited and gesticulating to shoo her from his office,
Go! Go!

She glances up to the green glass tower, stomach hollowing. Bill's son, Cameron, will be here. She has met him many times, including Christmas dinner twice. It was not terrible. She would watch him, civil in his upright posture, wrestling intelligently with himself, trying to get on with this Frenchwoman, only ten years older than him, this
salope
who had displaced
his mother. But now here she is getting more money than him, much more, and even to her this feels not right. The condo she is fine with—it is her home. She is also getting the Porsche, which she has not yet driven. But then she is getting the insurance money, which for an accidental death is exactly one million dollars. Cameron gets two hundred and fifty thousand,
un peu excessif
for a twenty-four-year-old aimless kid, but nothing to replace a father, and not as much as she is getting, which is the point. She who came along and broke up a family, who was married to him a mere three years. And in their country not much longer than that. Cameron's mother is getting nothing. Bill composed the will and allowed no grey.