“Jay!” Trout yelled from up in the loft.
Jeremy craned his neck back. “What?” he said up into the open air.
“Jay!” Trout yelled again. And Jeremy continued to gaze upwards, waiting for the little face to appear at the railing of the loft. The loft where Margaret and Olli slept in the huge antique sleigh bed. Beyond the bed was a second, smaller staircase that ran up a side wall into the back of the building. Into a small room, separate from the main space, with large rearward-looking windows and a very high ceiling. Here was Trout’s spectacular garret. A place where he could contemplate the hive of other lofts rising out of the slopes of Yaletown.
Trout didn’t appear, so Jeremy looked back down at Margaret and was startled to find her looking directly at him. Her hands cupped one of the quails, a bit of string emerging between her fingers, her expression thoughtful.
“Why don’t you go up and see him,” she said, and she lifted her chin slightly without moving her eyes from his face.
The truth was, all their dates had ended badly. Jeremy drunk and despondent, sucking down a final Pabst in whatever road-house The Decoders had selected to support their rockabilly fantasy that evening. Peggy in her hoop skirt. Bright red lipstick reapplied angrily. They argued endlessly about getting things done, or around this issue. They were both nineteen. She was fantastically impatient and practical, a deep well of potential energy. And taking Jeremy at his word, treated his music seriously too. She could not understand why the Decoder album never got made, and Jeremy played his natural nineteen-year-old nihilism off this pressure. Physically, she had grown into the strength that she now so clearly had. She had been tiny then, and frighteningly soft in his hands. The sex had been erratic. It hurt her sometimes. Other times he couldn’t perform, spent from drinking or from some fear she inspired.
From the very beginning they were being torn apart by the strong currents that ran through everything they jointly touched. They made an electric field, certainly, but Jeremy started feeling physically ill. He used to wake in the late morning, missing classes, feeling his heart beat. An unsteady beat he couldn’t play along with. It would stop without warning, miss two, three, even four beats. He was reminded of a documentary he’d seen about heart problems in cows raised under power lines, all that electricity running through them day after day.
One doctor’s visit convinced him he was at least partly bringing it on himself. The doctor said: “Do you drink a lot?”
Jeremy thought he probably did.
“How much on a weekend night? A six-pack?”
Which meant he was drinking a real lot.
Still, understanding it was self-induced did nothing for the symptoms, which persisted. Walking around campus at one point, ten in the morning, up a little earlier than normal, his heart went into its stuttering, falling two-step. He began to shake minutely and suddenly felt a tremendous certainty that at the end of the two-step his heart would simply stop. He’d never felt as certain about anything in his entire life as he was about the blackness sweeping up underneath his feet to catch him.
He laid down on the grass in the middle of the quad. Simply laid down flat, not caring what anyone might think. He slid an intro art-history text under his head and closed his eyes, whereupon he felt the dying two-step transmute into pulsing shapes. He didn’t like that particularly, not wanting to actually see the end coming. So he opened his eyes again, looked at the clouds, thought about God and waited for the curtains to fall.
By the end of an hour, flaked out, unmoving, the two-step simply faded away and was imperceptibly replaced by a softer, rounder beat, which Jeremy had to admit felt essentially normal. His heart was beating serenely along, the fibro-palsy having passed on through and disappeared.
But it was a catalyst. They split soon afterwards and adopted what they thought at the time was a very adult post-intimacy friendship, vibrating with aftershock tension. She hung out the available sign and found a boyfriend immediately: Cliff. And Jeremy (disgusted with this choice and possibly acting out a vicarious revenge plot) pushed her together with Olli. The lead singer setting up the girl with the bass player. He drinks even more than I do, enjoy! He knew Olli would go for her.
What he couldn’t have known was how Margaret would take to Olli. He made her laugh, she said. And so, assessing her options, Margaret dated Cliff and Olli for a stretch and wouldn’t let either touch her. Jeremy watched and shook his head, admiring how cool she was about the balancing act. Two boyfriends: a present perfect and a future conditional.
Present perfect, Cliff: who might be called a solid prospect, handsome, enrolled at medical school, but who by temperament and training was increasingly unsuited to dealing with anything outside the narrowing corridor of his own studies, which were evolving from success to success, from general practice to surgery to neurosurgery, which was simply beyond comprehension.
Future conditional, Oliver: stand-up bass player and computer geek. A clear long-shot. Olli was flying up through very different branches of the Tree of Knowledge than Cliff. He dug machine language, but also networks. This latter part, outside of music, made him interesting and assured his eventual future.
Jeremy found himself jealous of both Cliff and Olli, the two of them being even more jealous of each other. It made for an interesting triangle of male tension at Decoder shows, the serene midpoint of which was the radiant, hoop-skirted, check-shirted, Ked-wearing bopper dancing in front of the stage.
Jeremy would leer at her while singing and smoking and struggling with the huge, semi-functional, hollow body electric he played. Olli was good at ignoring it all; maybe that’s what made him irresistible in the end. He slapped the base and grinned at the empty air and let out little snarly rockabilly catcalls.
Cliff stopped coming to gigs eventually; it was just too embarrassing. He didn’t even like the music.
So she chose Olli. Not because Cliff gave up, precisely, or because of Olli’s interest in machine language but, Jeremy thought with some respect, because it was going to be her choice. It was a binary issue, but on her own binary terms.
Then again, Jeremy sometimes thought, maybe she chose Olli for his athleticism. His clean good looks. There was no accounting for the physical things that drove her taste. She did say once: “He’s a perfect mesomorph.” Jeremy had to consult the OED later. She liked his sandy hair. She liked the way he used to balance on the side of his stand-up bass, standing on it, one foot sticking out behind him, hand slapping away at the neck, cigarette dangling and his fine old butt sticking up in the air. She liked the big leopard-skin clodhoppers. Liked his blond soul patch. Liked that he was more funny than Jeremy. They never fought, she told him.
All these events in the spiralling months before Jeremy’s mother died. It had been sudden. Margaret went to his apartment near campus the day she found out. She buzzed three times before he would answer. There was an empty bottle of Jameson whiskey in the kitchen sink. Jeremy was cross-legged on the futon in his underwear. It seemed critical she be there, all of a sudden. She held him, awkwardly at first, but he reached back and clung to her. He cried.
“If you want to talk about her …,” Margaret tried. She had no idea if it was what you were supposed to do, only imagined that Jeremy was flooding with memories just then.
At which point he told her a stream of things. Anecdotes tumbling over anecdotes—some she knew, some not—but Margaret had the sense they were the family table of elements. The constituent pieces that had been passed down to Jeremy, that he now construed as making him who he was. Who the family had been. The blank Papier history. Unknowable. Severed. But also how the Professor and Hélène had met in France. How proud she had been to arrive in North America. To have a home and, shortly thereafter, a child.
And more. The stories spilled over one another. How his father’s research had continued whenever he was not teaching. In most years he had been gone for months. Her growing resentment. The meals they would cook together during these times—grill
ed meats, stews with yogurt—food different than their normal fare.
Once, Jeremy told Margaret, when he was just twelve, his mother and he had made a lean- to together from scratch down in the backyard. His mother had gathered fern branches from the forest behind the house. Jeremy had foraged for long, straight poles (he remembered finding a half-rotten oar). And after the lean- to was built, they had waited until dark to build a fire. His mother had defrosted a Safeway chicken, which they ran down a skewer and rotated over the flames. They basted it with oil into which she had crushed garlic and rosemary. He had a glass of wine that night, his first. She told him that before he was born, just weeks before, she had known he was a boy. She had known his name.
They slept out there in the backyard. Her arm protectively around him, old blankets piled over them in a heap. He woke up stiff, he told Margaret. She had been as fresh as the day before. Fresh and dry, somehow.
Margaret hugged Jeremy tighter. She had her own few memories of Hélène, although she didn’t speak of them that day. Always, there was Hélène’s beauty to consider. Her hair had lightened with the years, her dark skin gently creased. But the mouth was full, her figure still compact and shapely, the hands thin and long. She still walked with a flat-footed nonchalance, her shoulders back, a manner that was at once mischievous and sexual. Jeremy once took Margaret out to the house for dinner on a Sunday. Hélène stewed rabbits, something Margaret had never seen, let alone tasted. They were good and more, they were intriguing. But the Professor had spoken to her almost non-stop, and a real conversation with Hélène did not materialize.
Margaret tried to help clear dishes. She walked into the kitchen behind Hélène. She said: “It was delicious.” Not liking herself for sounding shy.
“Your first rabbit?” Hélène had responded.
Margaret remembered liking the Professor. She would see him from time to time on campus, and he would greet her in his not-overbearingly chivalrous manner. He always took great interest in her studies, although engineering was evidently foreign to him. “What kinds of questions would you like to answer?” he used to ask. When her interests had started tending to seismic engineering, he had been fascinated. He told her: “Curiosity about the earth, this crust of dirt and rock beneath our feet, that is one of the most rudimentary curiosities of all. I study how it is that people move across this surface, in groups or singly, or how it is they become stationary. You study how the surface beneath their feet might choose to move first!”
At the time, she thought he was interested in what could only be called a highly theoretical overlap in their disciplines. And, of course, she had been dating Jeremy at the time. But his manner remained on the occasions she’d seen him after they split. “Enchanted,” he would say, taking her hand with the tips of his fingers. “Now, you must tell me …”
They went to the funeral, of course, she and Olli. Still outside the chapel, she found herself standing next to a Papier family friend who was a doctor. “Very sudden,” the doctor explained to Margaret, tones hushed. “No antecedent symptoms.”
He said: cardiomyopathy.
And he said: sudden onset, lethal rhythm abnormalities.
Jeremy was there, stunned to silence. He smelled like liquor. He accepted their embraces and said nothing. The Professor did not recognize Margaret. He was consumed by the heat of his grief, shrunken in front of her. He extended a small hand.
“Professor Papier, we are so sorry,” she had told him.
“Yes,” he had said. “Thank you.”
“I’m Margaret. This is Olli.”
And even as the Professor took Olli’s hand, he looked closely at her. Remembering, she liked to think.
The casket was open. Hélène remained tragically beautiful. Margaret stared down and thought only: lethal rhythm abnormalities. Her own heart pumping, pumping.
And with that, their lives branched instantly, radically in new directions.
The Decoders never really broke up, they just stopped being. Moss Craven was going to grad school somewhere. Olli’s life was raking off in new and exciting directions. He was being scouted by companies in what was then a new place called Silicon Valley, turning them down for all that he felt he could do on his own. Six months after the funeral, he proposed to her. And after she said yes, Olli talked about children immediately, like it was something he needed to get off his chest.
Olli tracked Jeremy down in Dijon, through the culinary institute where he was reinventing himself. “Married. I can’t believe it,” Jeremy said over the scratchy international connection. But he was happy for both of them.
“She’s amazing, you know, Jay-Jay?” Olli said. “She knows what she wants. I am indebted to you for life. You know, man? For life. You my brother, man. You know?” Then he started singing.
“I gave her a ring … that was wo-oorn by my mother …”
“What time is it there?” Jeremy asked.
“ ’Bout ten,” Olli slurred. “I’m drunk.”
“No kidding.”
“But I’m quitting.”
The line crackled. The connection to his old band mate was held by a spider-web strand of static. Jeremy looked around himself, at the tiny apartment he was renting with the dark wood floors. Through the small open window he could hear the men and women at the marché couvert opening the grates over the stalls. Morning in Dijon.
Olli didn’t quit drinking right away. They ended up having the same conversation once again. To Olli’s credit, Jeremy supposed, only once more. Jeremy had just returned to Vancouver. An unemployed chef. The Monkey’s Paw was still a germinal idea he was going to carry around for a while, thinking of the Relais Saint Seine l’Abbaye, of Patrice, of three paintings in the Rijksmuseum and an epiphany about Blood.
“I gotta quit now,” Olli slurred, with a little more conviction than the last time. It was around midnight again. Jeremy was broke and sober.
“What is this?” Jeremy asked. “You’ve only said this to me once before. Is it a recurring two-year idea?”
Olli told him the reason and Jeremy was truly speechless.
“I went with her to get the ultrasound,” Olli spilled into the phone, dropping something in the background. “I could see his little pecker, man. I cried. I wept in the friggin doctor’s office.”
“Man,” Jeremy said. “How’s Peggy?”
Olli was breathing heavily into the phone. Restraining maudlin sobs.
“Why is it,” he said blearily, “that you call her Peggy and I always call her Maggie?”
They had him over for dinner to celebrate. When Jeremy thought back on this evening, it occurred to him that it was the first time they had him over to their place in Vancouver after his return from France. When Margaret was finally big with Trout, eight and a half months big, she was ready to see him. She had never been scared of him before, quite the contrary, but there had been a distance since his return to the city. He and Olli went out for beers a handful of times. Olli was never allowed to stay out too late.
At that celebratory dinner Olli and Margaret both drank Evian water, constantly topping each other up. Olli eyed the bottle of Concha y Toro but he didn’t touch it. Jeremy had to pour for himself, which he did steadily. He was a bit nervous, as if he were applying for a position. The conversation ambled here and there, catching up, covering familiar ground, common friends, the changes in Vancouver.
“So, Jay,” Olli said eventually, folding his hands in front of himself and putting his chin on his fists.
Jeremy stopped chewing. The moment had arrived, apparently. Margaret was looking at him too.
“Would you like to be a godfather?” Olli asked. “Maggie’s idea. It’s a Catholic thing.”
The question hung there. He’d been expecting something, but this particular thing surprised him.
“You’re the only person we know who even believes in God,” Olli said, and Margaret nodded.
The silence grew awkward. “You do, don’t you?” Olli said finally. “I mean,
I don’t, but I thought you did.”
“I do have a sense …,” Jeremy began, and then stalled, just like in so many internal dialogues he had had along these lines.
Olli and Margaret waited. Jeremy had a spiralling and sudden vision of the child inside her, as if he could see through her cotton sweater, her skin and the uterus wall. As if he had been selected. Acquired. The thumb came out from between the little translucent lips, the head rolled over to catch his words. He can hear my voice, thought Jeremy stupidly.
“I have a sense.,” he tried again, “. about being created. About having a Creator. I don’t know, that’s it, I guess.” And he reddened.
Olli smirked. “That’s what I meant.”
“So what’s the deal? What do I have to do?”
“You have to pray for him,” Margaret said. “Technically.”
“OK. Pray.”
Olli rolled his eyes. “You have to show up for the christening. You have to give expensive, adult-type presents for all of his birthdays. I think cufflinks are nice. You have to sign his passport application without question when he fucks off to Thailand for a year against my wishes. That kind of thing.”
Later, when the conversation had moved on, Jeremy asked: “Why Trout?” And Margaret’s eyes grew atypically dreamy. “Because he will be the only Trout in any classroom he ever enters. Because he will swim away one day. Because he will be the only Trout he ever meets.”
“He’d be the only Skunk too if we named him that,” Olli said.
It was their first date that had ended well. He had to date both of them was the trick. Jeremy hugged Margaret firmly at the front door of their apartment. Olli was getting tired and wanted to hit the hay, uncharged by the energy curve of alcohol. His body still adjusting. He seemed happy enough, Jeremy thought. Distracted, maybe.
They kept in steady touch after that. Jeremy attended the baptism in his official godfather capacity. Then, when Trout was three, they had the scare. First came the temperature. Olli and Margaret went through an eighteen-hour cycle of rising panic as children’s Aspirin, adult Tylenol, cool water, then ice water, did nothing to stop the escalation. Jeremy got a call from Margaret when they were at hospital already. Trout’s body had pumped up the thermostat to 107 by this point, fighting literally to the death with some invisible threat. Margaret wasn’t talking too much, just crying into the phone, exhausted with this sudden overwhelming unknown.
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