Coq, page 20
“There’s our man,” I say, tilting the screen toward my brother. His stomach makes a noise akin to a gravel truck crossing a bridge.
“Kinda looks like Mr. Bean,” Dan says.
“A little,” I agree. “But warm.”
He nods.
“Dad gave Mom an ultimatum.” I divulge my conversation with my father in the pool in detail. Line for line, lap for lap. Dan stares pensively at the ceiling the whole time I’m talking. “Isn’t that disappointing?” I finish.
He points. “There’s a spider on the ceiling.”
There is. We watch it glide across the ceiling like a float plane.
Dan sighs. “Love usually is.”
“Is what?”
“Disappointing. Look at us.” He gestures toward our reflection in the framed slab mirror drilled into the wall. Dan is chalk-faced and rotting. My makeup’s worn off and my nose has the high shine of a museum Cadillac. I have the scent of two men on my neck, which makes me feel simultaneously slutty and victorious, seventy-six unread emails in my inbox, a teen next door who never wants to leave Paris, and another who quite possibly wants to blow it up.
“I love two people.” The words come out as a tiny squeak but they topple like a confession.
“That’s okay,” Dan says.
Is it, though? In theory, sure. But what about reality, where you have to make actual decisions about where you will sleep and what kind of mustard or brand of beer you’ll buy, and who you’ll invite to your boss’s Christmas party. Invitations never ask for a “plus two.”
Felix: I don’t have ten years.
How many does he have?
“Here,” my brother says, slipping the prayer hands from his chest pocket. “You need them now.”
“I don’t know what to pray.”
“Just put ’em in your pocket.” My brother turns on his side, flips off the bedside lamp. In minutes he’s snoring. The spider’s changed course and tiptoes across the ceiling toward the open closet. I glance back at Émile, still locked on my screen, his sincere eyes and finely-fitted shirt, the blur of book spines on the shelf behind him, the chestnut leather portfolio on his lap. And then I see it: the ring. The muted gold band, the ruby. A perfect match for my mother’s.
thirty-eight
“They’re the same man,” Georgia shouts over the Peloton instructor prophesying in her home studio. “That’s why you can’t choose.”
The kids are at the pool, but I still cover the speaker and tuck underneath the comforter.
“If you pick Felix,” Georgia continues through laboured breaths, “you’re still picking Glen. You’re hardwired for those kinds of men.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Am I hardwired for Leavers?
“Passionate ones. The kind that’ll fly you to the moon and then leave you there.”
I think of the red shards splattered across the wall of I Love Yous.
“I mean, come on, Claud,” Georgia says. “Glen flew to Paris to surprise you and Felix wants you even though he saw you handcuffed to your ex. I’d tell you to go find someone placid, a librarian or a translator or a landscaper, but you’d never make it. You’d lose interest at the first hint of safety.”
“That’s not true.”
“What about the guy you met in Calgary that time? What was his name? Clark? Earl?”
Oh my God, Carl. Hung like a grandfather clock. I haven’t thought of his slippery forehead and mitten hands in years. I shiver.
“Wasn’t he a tax accountant or something?”
A manatee. “That wasn’t my fault.”
“My point is, whoever you pick — which by the way, I think is ridiculous, the very idea of choosing, I mean honestly, who says you have to choose? I’d have ’em both — the result will be the same.”
They’ll both leave?
I hear the Peloton instructor imploring Georgia to go faster. It’s the final sprint, the last day in Paris. Georgia exhales a strained fuck you. The spider from Dan’s room is now in mine. It lingers in the corner with its bayonet legs.
“As for the job,” Georgia says. “Negotiate. No one needs you to be anywhere. Unless you’re guarding a prison or amputating a leg, you can probably work from home and just go to the office a few times a quarter. Think of all the side trips you can make to Paris.”
“I’m never coming back here,” I say. “Paris slits you open, then leaves you in the sun to bleed out.”
“It’s teaching you how to love,” Georgia replies.
“Or grieve.”
“Same thing.” There’s a moment of silence before she adds, “If you do end up choosing someone tonight, I want the details. All of them.”
“I’m afraid I’ve already chosen the climate.” I grab the remote from the bedside table and flick on the TV. “Joan wants to go to a protest. She’s been planning all week. That’s how we’re spending our last night in Paris.”
“When in France,” Georgia sighs. “Be careful, though. I feel as though I’ve already seen it on the news.”
I open the TV menu, turn subtitles on and watch a cooking show. The chef is mixing pine needles with hair gel. I flip to the news: Vladimir Putin, intubated man, and placards even though the protest doesn’t start until seven, late if you ask me. I’m not sure of the purpose of an evening demonstration, but nothing is done in Paris without intention, from makeup to menus, poetry to punishment.
I land on The Curse of Oak Island, and feel a pang of homesickness. Nova Scotia, here, in Paris. I sit up in bed, and crank the volume. Rick and Marty have found a cribbing spike belonging to Jesus. They bag it and then bulldoze a tree. I imagine all the other things they could be doing right now besides treasure-hunting: making someone a cup of a tea, holding a grandchild and watching a squirrel tree-hop from their bay window, splinting a loved one’s broken finger. The show’s camera operator zooms in on the memorial commemorating the six men who died searching for the Oak Island treasure.
I think of Mona. Life is a training accident.
Maybe I don’t have to choose. Not between Glen and Felix, not between my current job and the one in Rotterdam. Maybe there’s a job in Newfoundland. A different career entirely. Another man. A completely different life.
A knock on the door. Mona’s brought coffees and croissants from downstairs. A plate of eggs.
“Good morning,” I say, clearing a spot where she can eat at the desk. It seems Joan’s made enough protest signs for all of us. I replace the cap on a red marker. Mona shuffles over, sets down her plate, and then hauls from her handbag a full-size bottle of ketchup.
“You want some?” she asks, thwacking the glass bottle.
I shake my head, take a croissant.
“I wanted to talk to you without your dad around. He went to the pool. It’s about your mother’s ring. The one that went missing.”
“I have it.”
Mona drops her fork. “You have it?” She leans back in the chair, closing her eyes in relief. “Oh, thank God.” She sputters her coffee. “Where’d you find it?”
“In your pantry.”
Her eyes grow. “In the pantry,” she repeats. “Of course. In the little Tupperware. I knew I’d seen it some place weird.” She pauses. “And you took it?”
“I thought you took it.”
“Well, I did, for a while. Your dad kept losing it. He’d take it out of the satchel, slide it on and off his pinkie. Leave it on the counter. A week after the wedding, I found it in his suit when I took it into the drycleaner. He thought he’d lost it at the church! I told him to put it somewhere secure. He wanted to give it you, here, but then he lost it again and I had to find a replacement.” She dabs her face with a napkin and then begins rifling through her purse. “I bought this,” she says, palming the imposter ring. “I know it’s not an exact replica, but your dad’s been just sick about it. I’m so relieved you have the real one.”
“He wanted to give me her ring?”
Her voices drops to a whisper. “All those years, he’d thought he’d given it to your mom. The matching earrings, yes, but not the ring.”
Typical of my father. To assume he’d given it to her. How perfectly inattentive. How predictable. “Émile,” I say, remembering his portrait, the soft shape of his hand on the portfolio, his wistful smile.
“Yes!” Mona shovels back the remainder of her eggs and then moves onto a croissant. On the TV, an excavator creeps across the narrow causeway connecting Oak Island to the mainland. A team of decrepit men with crushed dreams and hardhats watch and wait.
My voice cracks. “I don’t think my dad really knew my mom.”
“It’s possible,” Mona agrees. “I mean . . . I’ve read the emails, but he loved her, Claudia. I see it in his eyes when Stompin’ Tom comes on the radio or when I pull the snap peas from the garden, or polish with Pledge. But Émile loved her too.” Mona sets her plate aside and pats my knee as if to indicate the conversation is over.
“It’s kinda sad.”
“Or romantic,” she counters. “That’s the sober joy of marriage. Of life in general, really. It’s not the choices you make that cause life to be rich and tedious. It’s the ones you didn’t make. It’s all the possibilities and options you rejected. Every decision you ever made for something was also a decision against something. Or someone.”
“Then how do you reverse that? How do you make better choices so you don’t end up dead on an airplane, or alone like Émile?”
“Or alone like you,” Mona says, tapping my shoulder. “All you can do is accept your own finitude.”
Finitude. Not a word I expect to hear from Mona. Not now, coming out of her orange lips. Not when she’s dressed in a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt and leopard print leggings with a Jenga stack of bangles on her wrist. I want her to talk Wheel of Fortune, sales on boxed wine and Beach Boys reunion shows. I don’t want her talking about my finitude.
“We’re all on borrowed time, Claudia. When you reach my age you realize there’ll never be enough of it. The reality is, there never was.”
I wonder if this is the point in the sermon where she tells me I should start getting up at four to be more productive, have my groceries delivered, or switch to audiobooks so I can learn about time management while also commuting to work or climbing the Stairmaster.
“So?” I ask, unable to hide the exasperation in my voice. I’m a single mom. Of course I know about time and there never being enough. Why does she think I still have a rooster border in my kitchen or the donation box I filled last year still in my hallway? The fuck does this have to do with my mom staying married to my dad?
“So, use your time wisely.”
“That sounds reckless,” I reply.
She shakes her head. “Reckless is living like you’re entitled to tomorrow. Reckless is thinking you’d someday get to Paris, and getting runover by a banana boat instead. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we act like immortals. Finitude,” she repeats. “That’s the key.” Mona stands, leaves her egg plate behind, and heads for the door. “Now what in the hell does one wear to a protest?”
My head is reeling. “Something comfortable?” I suggest. “I imagine we’ll be on our feet for a long time.”
“And sneakers in case we have to run from the police.”
I stare at her.
“I’m just saying. We should prepare for anything.”
She backs out the door. I glare at her stained plate, the sad men of Oak Island. I open the hotel room safe, pluck Mom’s ring from the corner, slip it on and message Felix: meet me somewhere? He begins messaging back immediately and I focus on the ellipsis, waiting, waiting. Nothing.
Instead, a message from Glen. I’m coming to the protest.
I want him at the protest. I want him there as Joan’s father, whether to give her money or to reason with her, or to convince her when it’s time to leave or where to stand, or when to resist. I text him a thumbs up. Someone’s at the door. Mona, back to retrieve her plate, or her bottle of ketchup, which is sitting atop one of Joan’s posters.
“I’m coming,” I holler, screwing the lid back on the ketchup. I open the door.
Felix.
thirty-nine
“Hi” Is all I can muster. I’m barefoot, still in pajamas and clutching the ketchup bottle with an alcoholic’s grip, and yet I feel I might levitate, my heart is a helium balloon.
Felix wears jogging pants and an overcoat. His hair is wild, and the collar of his pink T-shirt is ratty and stretched. There are beads of rain on his shoulder. “I had to see you,” he says, stepping into the room. He holds my face, kisses my cheeks, my neck, my mouth, but it’s the hug that does me in. The quiet desperation of it, the longing. The kind you see at airports and liberation parades.
He whispers, “Come with me.”
I set the ketchup on the bathroom sink and tell him I’ll meet him in the lobby. The kids could be back any minute and they don’t need to see Felix lingering at the door. He heads for the stairs.
I change, brush my teeth, leave a note for Wes and Joan saying I’m going for a run, which is what I’m dressed for. I pass by the pool on my way down to the lobby. Everyone is there and a ripple of nostalgia passes through me. Swimming pools are sanctuaries. I’ve sought their alchemy from the time Wes and Joan were big enough for bathing suits, and plump enough not to turn hypothermic. We’ve swum to celebrate: birthdays, hat tricks, Saturday nights. We’ve swum to forget. You can blame anything on chlorine, especially tears.
The lobby is crowded with check-outs. Felix sits in a club chair, flipping through a magazine, but stands when he sees me coming. “Do you care where we go?” he asks, taking my hand. I don’t. I will go anywhere with him right now. Walcrotch, Jupiter, jail.
We step into the drizzle and Felix hails a cab to the neighbourhood of Montparnasse. We stop in front of a cemetery on a quiet, tree-lined residential street. He pays the toll in cash. “I bet Glen’s never taken you to a cemetery before.” He winks, and I remember just weeks ago standing with Glen in front of Mom’s headstone after Dad’s wedding. The exchange had been awkward, my first inkling that Glen was interested in . . . however you want to call it. A re-coupling? A salvage operation? But we’d been to other cemeteries before we had kids, mulling over the graves of Titanic and Halifax Explosion victims. We were young then, naïve about our own mortality, our finitude. Those tombstones could have been marking the unlived or benign: an ox shoe, a wizard’s wand, a bus pass. I never thought about death there or about the dead, their unrequited dreams or missed milestones. I thought about life. My own.
“I’ve always wanted to come here,” Felix says. He charges through the gate and down a pathway, periodically stopping to read the inscription on a mausoleum, or to run his hand along the mossy exterior of a tilted headstone. “So many artists and philosophers.” He gazes up at the sky, where a single band of sunlight pulses through a fissure in the clouds. “My favourite graves to visit.”
He rushes through rows of plots, zig-zagging from stone to stone — Egyptian, Renaissance, Gothic, Art Nouveau — pausing to catch his bearings, catch his breath. Who is he looking for? I pass a centenarian’s grave, then a terrorist attack victim’s. In the distance, a caretaker rakes a grassy mound at the edge of the cemetery.
Finally, Felix stops. Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Together. Their headstone is festooned with lipstick prints, Metro tickets and wilted flowers. Private messages are rock-pinned to the grave’s base. I don’t read them but note that at least one is written in Arabic, another in Dutch. Felix crouches, runs his fingers over the grave’s sandstone surface.
“It’s the philosophers who truly rest in peace,” he says, “because they lived in turmoil. I find that comforting.”
I find it depressing. Philosophers are assholes. They make it their life’s work to ruin everyone else’s life by constantly searching for meaning, questioning the status quo, telling the truth. They live in turmoil because through it all, they learn there is no meaning. The rest of us already know that. It’s why we shop at Winners, pretend to like chickpeas, and share Facebook posts of blind and jittery baby animals or elephants playing soccer. Why we take pictures of our salads or our biceps, or our sad, desperate faces, and hashtag them with apologies. I’m pretty sure it was Sartre who said, “I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
Felix pulls a small, fortune cookie-sized slip of paper from his pocket. I can’t make out what he’s written, but I help him find a stone to anchor it to the grave and then I wander over to a bench. When Felix has finished his pilgrimage, he joins me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I ask. The question doesn’t come out how I want. It sounds vague and almost accusatory, as if the wrong I’m assigning is this cemetery visit, not whatever illness has him leaving notes for dead philosophers.
“I have a heart condition,” he replies.
So do I.
“And it’s terminal?” Haven’t they solved all heart conditions now? Aren’t there stents and pacemakers and pigs for that? Has Elon Musk not figured this out?
“I have less than a year.”
Less than a year? A surge of panic. It’s such a cruel estimate. Less than a year can mean three hundred and sixty days or three, another birthday or another Tuesday. It can be months; it can be minutes.
“And there’s no cure? No experimental treatment?” Joe Rogan probably has one. Or Diane on Twitter. Maybe the cure is buried on Oak Island. Maybe if he just ate more broccoli or shared a meme about body positivity, he’d feel better.
“We’ve tried.” I picture his “we”. His team of doctors, surgeons, specialists, counsellors. His eyes are glassy. “You know, I’ve made peace with my diagnosis. Every time I travel, I come to places like this. Places where people suffered much more violent deaths. Beheadings, tramplings, falls from buildings. At least I know I’m going to die. I can prepare for it.”
I think of my mom. Of all that was unsaid or undone because she didn’t know when she boarded that plane home from Cuba, that she would never touch down. She would never again pick up her grandchild, phone a friend, make love, spread butter on a muffin, feel the rain. But maybe it’s easier that way. I can’t imagine preparing for my own death. I’d overthink the invitations and the theme as if it were a child’s party.
