Double Talk (6 page)

Electrifying is how Violet will later describe the moment she turns and faces that gathering. In that instant, she says, all her preconceptions and her doubts were atomized. What she feels is the collective force of goodwill. These people, she understands for the first time, are more than family and friends — they are her life.

They have transformed the bunker: the floor space is covered with a large circular rug, its red and earth tones picking up on the rust of the artillery piece that stands in the mouth of the pill-box. Violet knows that Wallace and Geoff are responsible for this touch. She mouths a thank you to Wallace, whose eyes fill with tears. It occurs to Violet that he loves her. She will soon love him.

The walls are draped at intervals with silk screen fabrics emblazoned with birds and tropical fish. Suspended from the ceiling are tie-dyed sheets that have been roughly sewn together —Violet recognizes Nancy's handiwork. She recognizes the sheets. At least two of them were on Nancy's bed the day that Violet and Brian — dropping by to feed Nancy's cat and water her plants — decided to seize the erotic potential of a strange futon and the bottle of baby lotion they found in the bedside table. She remembers the feeling of Brian's back muscles slick under her hands, the slipperiness of his bum cheeks. She also remembers how pissed off Nancy was.

Pots of nasturtiums and violet harebells hang from the walls. Standing on the floor, in a semi-circular cluster, framing the spot where Brian and the United Church minister stand, are tall glass vases filled with ferns and tiger lilies. When the wind blows in off the sea, the whole space sways and flutters with colour.

Nothing prepares her for their exchange of vows. She and Brian have decided not to write their own. They think it too gauche — the kind of thing done on soap operas or at weddings where the groom sports a mullet and a powder-blue tuxedo, where the bride wears a headband and a dress that billows like soap suds out from below her washboard ribs. A day later, Violet can't even remember their vows — they were something standard, she thinks: to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part.

She expects to feel embarrassed, expects to look into Brian's eyes and see a glimmer of irony or the slightest elevation of his notoriously elastic eyebrow. She sees nothing of the kind. He looks so certain that he gives her courage. But he is not certain at all. His palm is sweaty and his grip is too tight when he reaches to take her hand. His voice has a slight tremor as he recites his vows. These are some of the things that make the scene believable to her; these and the fact that everyone looks at them as though they have made the right choice. All those present seem willing to step away from their hard-won positions and subscribe one more time to the shining ideal.

Later, Brian will tell Violet that the atmosphere reminded him of the story of the apostles after the death of Jesus, the moment when, huddled in fear in some rented room, they are infused with the Holy Spirit. When he said this she just smiled. She chose not to say what she was thinking — once a Catholic always a Catholic. She didn't want to ruin his buzz.

Violet knows the experience was a false one, an illusion, and a pretty common one at that. Devlin says scratch a cynic and you'll find a sentimental fool. Lying next to Brian in their hotel room that night, Violet understands that their plain sense has been hijacked by sentimental notions. Thank goodness, she thinks, for the sterility of that hotel suite. It somehow returns a critical edge to her thinking. She is suddenly glad she let her mother rent it for them. “We don't want to stay in a hotel,” she argued. But her mother would not hear of them returning to their dingy apartment. She stressed the word dingy.

Violet and her new husband spoon together under the striped coverlet, high on champagne and red hash. They both know they are in the grip of some kind of hysteria. They feel awkward. As far as she is concerned, getting carried away on the day's proceedings has undermined the truth, has tarnished the fact that in their own minds they were already married, and had been since the morning, four months earlier, when Brian got up from his childhood bed, walked down the stairs to the stone-cold kitchen of his parents' house, and phoned Violet.

It was still night in Newfoundland. Violet had just returned home from The Ship Inn — not drunk for the first time in ages. In fact, she had been lying in bed thinking that she was finally starting to let go of Brian. For the first time since he boarded the plane and disappeared, she did not feel the pain in her stomach that flared whenever she pictured him. And then the phone rang. It was Brian, his voice, Irish and distant, following the black wire from his mouth to the red phone on her bedside table.

“I miss you so much, Vi. I can't stand it being without you.”

She felt the air leave her body and rush back in. She felt the universe trampoline as if something heavy had fallen on its surface and begun to roll in ever decreasing circles around the dimple where it would inevitably come to rest.

“Are you coming back?”

“I'll come back if you marry me. I love you, Vi.”

“I love you, too.” Violet felt a moment's hesitation. Afterwards, she told herself it was simply a reluctance to move back into the orbit of longing that she has just started to break away from. “Yes, oh-my-God. Of course I'll marry you. Just get back here, okay?”

Three weeks later, too broke to get a cab, she took the Metrobus to Bell's Turn and walked the last mile to the airport. It was warm for June. By the time she got to the terminal, sweat was soaking into her Indian cotton dress and her ballet shoes were covered with white dust. One quick sweep across the arrivals lounge and she picked out Brian — his ramrod-straight posture, the way his head nodded as he chatted to an old lady he must have met on the flight. Violet watched him heave two suitcases off the baggage carousel and place them on the woman's trolley. She let her eyes linger on his forearms, then on his long fingers. Her toes clenched involuntarily. She wanted to run over to him, but waited, deliberately delaying the moment when he would turn and look for her.

Three months later, as they cuddle together in their antiseptic bridal suite, Violet feels they have somehow damaged, or if not damaged, at least clouded, the memory of that day. The enormous empty bed next to theirs stares back accusingly. Brian is kissing the back of her neck and running his fingertips delicately over her breasts, down over her stomach, then gingerly testing the elastic waistband of her underwear as though he is unsure about whether to go on, as though he has never gone there before. He is making her so horny.

“I'm on my period,” Violet says. “I meant to tell you earlier but I couldn't find the right moment.” His hand hesitates slightly before resuming its movement back up across her belly. She breaks out in goosebumps. She feels delirious, from the champagne, from the hash, from the excitement of the day, and now from his touch.

Sounds and images keep flashing through her mind: the cheers and applause that filled the bunker as if the sea had come crashing in; the sight of her mother's dress rippling around her shapely legs as she walked across the parking lot to their car; for some reason, the recent image of Nelson Mandela walking away from the prison where he had survived for many years; her mother and Geoff doing an improvised tango in the living room of Geoff and Wallace's house; Wallace looking on, grey-faced; Keppie and her dad drinking whiskey in the kitchen and singing sea shanties; her dad joking and telling legal horror stories all the way through dinner; her brother David's consternation when the lobster he ordered came in its shell, not realizing that the bottom half had been removed and that he had only to lift the top to expose the meat, then wearing the shell on his head like a party hat once he had figured it out. The waiters and staff were not impressed with them. Not during the meal and not afterwards when Wallace threw up in the garbage pail outside the restaurant, while the chef, replete in tall white hat, watched with arms folded from behind the plate glass window. Then, at the last moment, as Violet and Brian shouted frantic goodbyes from the cab, Devlin ran up to the open window and pressed a generous knob of red hash into Brian's hand.

Violet presses her body hard against Brian. She feels out of control. It is partly the effect of the hash. She feels a wifely duty towards him — How can they not do it on their wedding night? People passing outside in the hallway laugh. For a second she imagines they are going to enter the room. She settles again. The long slow silk ribbons in her womb begin to unravel and smoothly slip. But all for nothing, she thinks. She knows that Brian is repulsed by the sight and smell of menstrual blood. “Poor guy,” she says, when she tells Nancy about their wedding night, “he married a gusher.”

“We don't have to do anything,” she says, arching her back and pushing it against him until she feels his erection fit neatly into the cleft of her bottom. “We don't have to do anything,” she says, moving slowly up and down against him until he begins to move against her. For a moment she is turned on by the idea of letting him in the back door. It would not be so out of character for them, she reasons. After all, her role has always been the experienced one while his is that of the ingénue. It was she who took his virginity that afternoon in her residence room. She knew from his ham-fisted effort that day that it was his first time, but she pretended not to. Instead, she made him feel that his first thirty-second performance was champion.

She continues to move against him. As his efforts become a bit more pointed, she loses some of her resolve. She knows it is something most men want to try — some women even say they enjoy it. But she is still lucid enough to know that it is the idea and not the act that appeals to her. There is something in the thought of that deflowering that seems just right, something to correct the sterility of the room, something to redress the formality of the day, something to nullify the presence of her parents in their suite across the hall. She senses their coming together in that way will form a deep equation in which two wrongs will make a right; they will enter — albeit with the help of lubrication — a parallel universe in which two plusses will make a minus. And below and beyond all that, there will be deep pleasure in their shame.

In the end, they do something far more radical. Violet turns to face her new husband and they kiss, tentatively and sweetly, as though for the first time. Long after he closes his eyes, she lies there looking at his face. In the half light, he seems to keep changing — another hallucination. She imagines he is being visited by all his male ancestors, their faces briefly flashing across his, drawn by the possibility that their former existence may soon find form again.

“I'm so happy that we found each other, Brian.” She whispers, not knowing if he is asleep. “I love you so much.”

Baby
Power

As I stood next to Violet on our wedding day, in that concrete bunker underneath Fort Amherst, I imagined I was hooked up to a porthole-shaped monitor that displayed energy wavelengths in green. A similar screen hovered above the heads of everyone present. I couldn't believe that we were just moments away from pulling it off. What a farce. And yet suddenly it didn't feel farcical. My monitor readouts were jumping all over the place as I tried to deal with competing thoughts and feelings. As well, the flowers were aggravating my allergies, making my nose run and my eyes mist over. I was worried that those gathered might think I was about to burst into tears. Okay, maybe it was good for Violet's viper-eyed mother to think that, but my friends, I knew from experience, didn't prize what Devlin referred to as emotional incontinence. When they were around, I tended to keep my deeper feelings under lock and key. The truth was, of course, that my feelings were staging a breakout. At that moment, I felt not so much a duty as a wish to embrace the role of groom. Violet and I were about to perform an act that, until then, we had only ever performed in private. I could feel my will, almost against my will, start to align with the collective energies in the room. No wonder I was sweating under the dead-man's suit I had bought from the Saint Vincent DePaul. As the ceremony began, I watched the spyrograph waves on each monitor slowly calm, the arcs and ellipses collapse into a single bright green line.

And then we were done. We had consecrated our union, and, as foretold, the spirit dove upon us, manifesting as that highly prized, though most transient phase of consciousness: happiness.

I stood and took in the breathtaking view from there. I stood on that blissful planet for as long as I could and basked in a kind of stasis. I listened to the white noise of countless jammed frequencies and ignored the pulse of that one bass note calling me back to earth. And yet, even as we were joined by words, even as family and friends applauded and cheered, even as we felt their bodies press us closer together — I remember the heft of Nancy's breast against my back and the jaggedness in Violet's mother's embrace — a contrary note sounded. Even as I kissed my wife for the first time, in that bunker cooled by sea breezes and lightened by colourful cloth and the scents of flowers, I was drawn by a mounting note of discord. No sooner had we exited the chamber through a swirl of confetti than I began to hear half notes and quarter notes within it. In fact, no sooner had I slipped into the back seat of Keppie's Lada, than I began to look past the smiling faces and the upraised hands of our well wishers. I began to look over the flat concrete slabs of the bunkers and out through the glittering Narrows at the North Atlantic.