Double Talk (18 page)

Finally, when Bill stopped braying, Keppie leaned across the table and said, “It's the
Leafs
, b'y. The Toronto Maple
Leafs
.”

“You're some stunned, my buddy,” said Bill.

“Y'know, Bill, no one in Ireland plays ice hockey.”

“You don't have no hockey over in Ireland. My son, you'd be some sight on a hockey team. You'd be some little pussy.”

I knew I should have been angry, but the way he said “pussy,” while sticking out his big horse lips, made me want to laugh.

“So you're a hockey player then? What position do you play?”

“Oh, he knows something about hockey, now, do he? What position do I play? Well, b'y, I plays in goal.”

I imagined myself picking up the coconut cream pie and smashing it as hard as I could into his stupid-looking face. Here's a new goalie mask for you, then, I wanted to say. I imagined the crackling sound the tinfoil pie plate made as it crumpled. I imagined cream and crumbs flying across the table, spattering Keppie and Devlin, both of whom would look at me in astonishment. I imagined Bill Cheeseman jumping to his feet, knocking his chair halfway across the kitchen. I imagined bracing myself for his punch, watching his fist rise up to his ear, then freeze in mid-air.

But as it turned out I didn't have time to follow through on this fantasy.

“What in frig is going on, Keppie?” Keppie's father was standing at the bottom of the stairs, his hands on his hips.

“Nothing,” said Keppie.

“Hi, Mr. Gushue,” said Bill. I imagined Bill grinning through his cream facial and giving an absurd little wave.

“It's time for you all to go home.”

V

Violet
Budd

Slamming through the door earlier that evening, Violet glanced quickly at Brian's exclamation-studded note, but with Lucy whining that she had left Mr. Lamb at Nancy's and Joe smelling like a ripe skunk, she didn't have time to separate and weigh her feelings about it. Given what was at stake, she knew she should have been glad his presentation went so well; and yet all she could think was that he had torn a page from the W section of her leather-bound address book.

Three hours later, the kids in bed, she reads his note for the second time. If she is expecting an effervescent rush of happiness to flood her extremities with blood and send a tingle through her skin, she is sorely disappointed. The double-bond paper shakes in her grip. She is angry, unable to get past one glaring fact: instead of staying home to celebrate with his family, he chose to go downtown with Frank James.

Frank James. Violet is sick of the name. Brian can't seem to get enough of his new old best buddy. Frank has recently returned to St. John's after a decade in Toronto. Frank James, whose brimming pupils — at least back in their student days — always seemed perpetually about to discharge a clot of tadpoles; Frank James, whose all-natural product set many a young prince on the path to becoming a frog; Frank fucking James, she thinks, who in the intervening years — it is rumoured — had acquired a taste for expensive suits and new product lines.

She drops the note, watches it stick to the overlapping Olympic rings their glasses made on the table top. Rum, she suspects. There is a wet dishcloth abandoned on the Bombay Company sideboard, and a burnt-out cone of incense sits in the fire grate. The window next to the table is slightly ajar. She thinks she can smell hash. But more disturbing to her are the shards of pink plastic on the carpet. Like someone cracked open a disposable ladies' razor. She scans the table surface for snow-white flecks, but finds none. Still, she is worried. If they had gotten that smashed that early, she wonders, what might they have gotten up to once they drank their way through happy hour?

The image of a stripper turning counterclockwise around a brass pole enters Violet's mind, becomes yet another ingredient in the whirlpool of images that for hours has dizzied her brain, a whirlpool that also contains Stephanie and Marcella circling one another in her office, Nancy's angry face at lunchtime as the taxi pulled a U-turn, and Wallace, poor bloated Wallace, turning helplessly on the very rim of the sinkhole.

Violet feels sick to her stomach. She wants the daydream-nightmare carousel to stop. She had hoped to fall asleep while putting Lucy and Joe down for the night, but not even her favourite lullaby, “Edelweiss,” sung nine times, could calm her racing thoughts.

Violet's day had begun so differently. She awoke with a sense of possibility. The thought of their lives taking a turn for the better felt tangibly present. It was the day of Brian's big presentation. If Violet was surprised that Brian had bid on a public tender to redesign the provincial government's social services' website, she was floored — though no more than he was — when he was invited by a monotonous-voiced Mr. Duffy, executive assistant to the ADM, to present his design before a panel of bureaucrats. “Oh-my-God,” Brian said, as they played the phone message for the third or fourth time, “it's Marvin the Paranoid Android. He has to be a blood relative of the minister. Has to be.”

Violet knew it was a make-or-break day for Brian — for them. Paying their MasterCard bill by Visa and their Visa bill by MasterCard was becoming too much of a habit. They needed a second income. Brian had been a stay-at-home-dad since Violet's maternity leave ran out a month earlier. Violet thought he was doing great with it — Joe being such an easy baby — though she knew Brian had no long-term plan to continue in the role. He wanted his business to take off. He wanted to be seen in the eyes of the world as someone.

Kissing him goodbye as she left the house that morning, Violet couldn't help noticing how thin his freshly shaved neck looked inside his dress shirt collar. His little-worn suit seemed to deflate around his bones when she hugged him. She whispered in his ear that it would be fine, that they would love him. But secretly she wondered. She had no way of judging the presentation he had spent weeks preparing. He hadn't allowed her even a glimpse of it. All he would say was that he was bringing Dante's
Inferno
to the provincial government.

Violet's day, which had started so well, with an easy handover of the kids to Nancy, with the bus being on time, with her and Brian being so pumped about the possibility of his landing a good job, took a turn for the worse at exactly ten minutes past ten o'clock, the precise moment the HR Manager and the Freight Forwarding Manager stepped into her office. Hindsight being 20-20, Violet can now see that there were omens she should have read. Just a few minutes earlier, as she reclined in her ergonomic chair, looking up at the window — her office is half above ground, and the only view its one window usually afforded is of weeds and grass stalks — her pigeon friend came knocking for the third time that week. She knew it was the same pigeon because it had some kind of globular growth at the top of its beak that seemed to be eating into its flesh, giving its red-rimmed eye a startled, pulled open look. At the time, she had no sense that it was a portentous pigeon, though she did note how it pecked rhythmically on the plate glass, repeating what was beginning to strike her as a pattern. In fact, Violet had just begun to toy with the idea of counting the number of taps it made each time, when an approaching pedestrian sent it flapping away. And what about that pedestrian, she wondered afterwards, presaging or what? That courier in loose fitting shorts who, squatting to tie the variegated laces on his trainers, inadvertently afforded her a glimpse of his dangling scrotum.

“Oh-my-God,” her assistant squealed, when Violet told her about it at break time: “A drive-by tea-bagging.”

The day which began so well for Violet had spun out of control. And it is still spinning at ten o'clock that night when she climbs the stairs to Brian's study, clutching a beer in one hand and his written instructions about how to find his presentation in the other. She is still angry that he refused to show her his design while it was a work in progress. Angry and puzzled — Is his confidence so damaged? she wonders. Is there something about her that has a corrupting effect on him?

She flips the power switch on his new Pentium computer. She watches as the screen lights with that lovely ascending light-to-dark spectrum of blue that always has a calming effect on her, almost always makes her think of first light on a summer's day. Tonight, though, it makes her feel melancholy, brings to mind Oscar Wilde's maudlin lines, written soon after his release from prison: “Upon that little tent of blue/ which prisoners call the sky.”

Computers: had there ever been an invention that promised so much while delivering so little? Well, television, maybe, she thinks. It just amazes her that so many people choose to see the world through this little porthole — her own husband for one. He spends endless hours basking in the light of that flickering screen. He says the Internet gives him a view on the entire planet. “But what are you doing, what are you looking at for all those hours?” she asks. He never gives her a satisfactory answer.

“You just don't get it,” he says, “it's more about the journey, the connections, the possibilities.”

Violet watches Brian's desktop light up with rows of familiar software icons. She feels again the presence of Marcella Squires, HR Manager and ex figure-skating champion, and Stephanie Northcott, Freight Forwarding Manager and mainstay of the local Indie Rock scene. She keeps circling back to the moment, shortly before coffee break, when they entered her office unannounced. Again, she smells Marcella's structured deodorant jostling with Stephanie's cloud of patchouli. She notes Marcella's crisp suit, stiletto heels, her sixty-year-old red hair and the set of her jaw. She recognizes Stephanie's powerful shoulders and low centre of gravity — Who was it, Violet wonders, that said ninety percent of communication is non-verbal? She thinks about Dave, their CEO, and the day that she, a new hire, told him she was pregnant, how even as he smiled and offered congratulations he stuck out his coffee-bloated gut in an obscene parody of gestation. It was obvious to her from that one gesture that he did not approve of maternity leave. And it was obvious from Stephanie and Marcella's rigid body language that they had come to a serious impasse, although in their case it was probably over something trivial.

Sometimes the workplace just gets to Violet — the niggardliness of it. And it has only gotten worse since Joe was born. Very little of what happens there seems important to her anymore. At any given hour of the workday — it makes no matter if she's in a meeting or alone in her office — she can plunge into self-pity. “It's like my inner talk gets stuck in a loop,” she tells Nancy. “I keep asking myself over and over why I'm there instead of at home with my children.” Violet has coined a name for her condition: workolepsy. And that morning she was stricken by it at the exact moment she was supposed to be paying attention to the two women standing in front of her. Suddenly, between the filing cabinet and the coffee maker (as in optical tests demonstrating the existence of blind spots) there was only a patch of beige carpet where both women had been. By the time Violet snapped back to attention, bantamweight Stephanie was on her feet, her crimson-tipped Mohawk bristling as she shook her fist in Marcella's face while uttering a remarkably fluent stream of obscenities.

In retrospect it seems laughable to Violet, but there had been real violence in the air, so much so that she felt compelled to physically insert her body between the two women. Stephanie was shouting, her spit hitting Violet on the side of her neck as she uncorked months of bottled up resentment, accusing Marcella of being a cold, manipulative bitch, telling her she played favourites, that everyone knew this, etc., etc. In the face of Stephanie's barrage, the older woman kept her cool, though Violet did notice that Marcella's body went rigid and a small blush gradually began to establish itself on her heavily powdered cheeks. To make matters worse, Violet heard footsteps on the other side of the door, the collective hoary ear of the office listening in. She thought about doing something outrageous — like breaking into a Broadway tune — anything to end the tension, but in the end she simply ordered them out of her sight, suggesting in the strongest possible terms that they have no contact with one another until she called them together again.

As she waits for Brian's PowerPoint to load, Violet watches a small animated dog walk around the screen, cocking his leg periodically to take a piss, each time leaving a ghostly image of himself behind. As the file begins to load, Violet feels an illicit thrill, as though she is about to read a new entry in Brian's diary. The web page opens with a nuclear flash. “Welcome to the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador: Social Services Department.” Underneath the heading are nine concentric circles in deepening shades of red, each one labelled and linking to another page of concentric circles, each circle of which links to a page of information about a specific service or policy, with the innermost circle on each page linking to online or telephone help. The design is either absurdly simple or very elegant. It looked nothing like any government website Violet has ever seen. She knows it is unlikely that bureaucrats would approve such a radically different look, unless they were willing to duplicate it across all government sites.

And yet such is Violet's need to believe that it could happen that she falls into a daydream in which Brian is making $100,000 a year as a systems administrator and she is free to do what she likes. She sees herself driving around in a new lime-green Volkswagen Golf, while an Irish nanny — unattractive, but generous and loving — stands guard over her offspring. She sees herself entering the Spa at the Presbytery, flashing her platinum member's card, her ticket to buffing, spritzing, lathering, lacquering, plucking and combing, while simultaneously getting sozzled on an endless supply of vodka martinis.