Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  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.

  Pure fantasy, she knows, because how could Brian imagine that offering a design based on Dante’s Inferno would be seen as anything more than a joke? Violet thought he was joking the first time he made a passing reference to the idea. Perhaps it is arrogance on his part, she thinks; perhaps he thinks no one among the junior-level bureaucrats will get it. But how long, she wonders, before someone gets it and turns the joke back on him?

  Navigating back and forth through the site she begins to feel angry. She knows there is no way it could have taken him a month — seven days a week and fourteen-hours a day — to create these pages. She looks through his files for alternative designs, for evidence of work that would support the amount of time he had spent developing the presentation, time in which she had to assume full responsibility for work, for the children, for cooking, cleaning, shopping, for taking out the garbage, for cleaning the cat box and for turning off the lights last thing at night.

  Trying to juggle everything on her own has been more than a stretch. That morning — the morning of his big presentation — she was forced to call once more on the sleep-deprived Nancy. When Violet arrived back late at lunchtime, Nancy’s face had the waxen look of someone on the verge of a blow-out. Violet wanted to explain about her weirdly stressful morning, but Nancy wasn’t interested. “Hold the taxi for me, I’m late,” she shouted, as she swung the bassinet containing her pimple-faced newborn, Clarence, into the back of the Jiffy cab.

  “I’m sorry, Nancy. I’m so sorry,” Violet said, while thinking that all she ever seemed to do was apologise for not being in two places at once.

  “I shouldn’t be more than an hour,” Nancy shouted through the cab window. “Joe just went down for his nap about ten minutes ago. Lucy’s in the kitchen. She wants …”

  Lucy’s arms wrapped around Violet’s leg. “Mommy, will you please come and watch my game? We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Violet sat on Nancy’s kitchen counter while Lucy stood on a chair at the sink playing poolside Barbies. Violet had a view of the living room and that day’s newspaper lying on the couch. She was anxious to look up “Positions Wanted” to see if there were any new ads under child-care, but she knew that if her attention strayed from Lucy’s game, the child would throw a tantrum, which would probably wake Joe.

  All Violet’s attempts to find a day-time sitter had been fruitless. Four weeks in a row she placed an ad in the weekend paper — “Needed: loving person to care for a delightful six-month-old baby boy ( Joe) and a vivacious three-year-old girl (Lucy); 9-5 Mon-Fri. Downtown area.” The fourth time she added the phrase, “salary negotiable.”

  There were exactly three applicants. Two were so inarticulate as to seem — at least over the phone — borderline retarded. The third was a virago. Her voice had the rasp of one who smoked three packs of Players Light a day. Later, Violet tells Nancy that before she even had a chance to talk about the kids, the woman began laying out just what she would and would not do for her money. “I baby-sits in your home only. And I don’t do no laundry and no housework. My job is to see to the baby. I loves babies. And I wants an hour for lunch.”

  “And is there anything else?” Violet asked.

  “Well, now that you ask. There is. Do you have a TV?”

  “No TV,” Violet lied, “just the radio.”

  “Then it’s a no go, my love, cos I has to watch me soaps in the afternoon.”

  It occurs to Violet that Brian’s website design looks a lot like a target — a virtual firing range. It makes her want to pick up a gun and start shooting. Perhaps virtual reality games may one day prove a cure for stress, she thinks. Perhaps we will one day have virtual nannies. And maybe pigs will fly. Since Lucy’s birth, Violet’s life has been nothing but stress. She knows she could write a book on the subject — a taut philosophical thriller, she tells Nancy, about a woman who undergoes a series of random muggings. Over a glass of wine they craft a blurb:

  Stress is the story of the self returning to live in the ancient body, slowly draining from the upper brain, leaching through the cerebellum and into the brain stem and the spinal cord, fragmenting until it is reduced to a sequence of neurons firing in response to any stimulus, sometimes not firing at all, sometimes misfiring. Did I turn off the stove? Did I leave the baby food out on the counter overnight? One sweats the details because there are no major or minor chords; everything is equally fine-grained or coarse-grained; everything has the same weight. One’s body is drenched, not in perspiration, but in some nearly odourless, flammable liquid. Thoughts arise, randomly, each one a match that may spark self-immolation. How could you have ever believed? Didn’t you know that all roads eventually lead here, which is nowhere? Every decision you have ever made has been a bad one, every choice the wrong one. Did I save a copy of that report? What time did I say I’d pick up the kids? Did I lock the car door? Yes, you already checked it. Check again. If only I could sleep. But sleep offers no respite. You stand at the edge of a cliff waiting to be carried across, awaiting an angel who smells like clean laundry. But you no longer believe in angels. Drugs might allow you to ignore the impasse. Shock therapy might bridge it. What is stress, you think, but the foothills of outright madness?

  Violet knows she is being ridiculous. What right has she to compare the stress of an ordinary life with real mental illness? What are the trials of her daily life compared with those Wallace had gone through in recent months? Memories of the day she and Brian tried to visit him at the Waterford Hospital hover on the edge of her imagi
nation, then recede. Not yet. Not yet, she thinks. I won’t allow them.

  HIV positive for some time, Wallace had weathered a number of infections and periods of ill-health. He then began to experience symptoms of a slightly different order. He began to forget things. These episodes, mild at first — losing keys, forgetting appointments, forgetting to take out the garbage — soon became more serious. He began to have trouble doing up the buttons on his shirt. His handwriting changed to such an extent that he had difficulty cashing cheques. He began to forget mid-journey where he was going and why he was going there.

  It was obvious to Violet and Brian and everyone else that he was deteriorating, and yet his forgetfulness did not come bundled with depression or sadness. There were times, Violet thought, when he seemed more physically robust than he had been in years. There were even some positive changes in his behaviour. His obsessive neatness and habit of double and triple checking everything, traits that had always been annoying to others, disappeared practically overnight. He got his hair cut, ditching the trademark comb-over which he had lovingly maintained for years. “Too much trouble,” he said. If it worried him that his memory was deteriorating, he didn’t let it show. He even laughed about it. During that phase, which subsequently became known to Violet and Brian as the middle phase, an evening in front of the television with Wallace could tip over into the absurd.

  “Who’s playing, Brian?”

  “The Habs and the Leafs.”

  “Who’s winning?”

  “It’s 2-1 for Montreal.”

  “What period?”

  “Second period.”

  Turning to his newspaper, Wallace reported: “It says here that Garry Kasparov was beaten at chess by a computer.” He then read aloud: “‘IBM’s Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, the first time a computer beat a chess World Champion in a match.’ Isn’t that something, now?”

  “It is … Oooh.”

  “What? Did someone score?”

  “Toronto almost did.”

  “Who did you say they were playing?”

  “Montreal.”

  “Any score?”

  “It’s 2-1 for Montreal in the second period.”

  Wallace fell silent for a few minutes, watching the game. He then turned back to the paper. “It says here that Garry Kasparov was beaten at chess by a computer. ‘IBM’s Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, the first time a computer beat a chess World Champion …’ Why did you change the channel?”

  “It’s the end of the second period.”

  “The Habs and the Leafs, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Any score?”

  “It’s 2-1 for the Habs.”

  “Why did you say you changed the channel again?”

  “It’s the end of the second period.”

  “Don’t forget to flick back to it now.”

  Violet decided it was funny. And it was funny until the evening a traumatized Geoff showed up at her door wearing a tensor bandage on his head. Underneath it, she would find out, were train tracks of stitches, the result of Wallace having smashed him with a Tiffany lamp. “But why did he do it?” Brian asked, ostrich-like to the facts of his uncle’s illness.

  “Why?” said Geoff. “The immediate reason was that I didn’t bring him the peanut butter sandwich he asked for. The real reason, of course, is that he’s dying.”

  “Oh, come on!” Brian snapped, annoyed by what he had begun to see as Geoff’s willingness to embellish. In private, Brian confessed to Violet his suspicion that Geoff was getting ready to dump his long-time lover.

  “It probably means he has another infection — that’s all. Once the antibiotics kick in he’ll be back to himself.”

  “Maybe,” said Geoff. “Anyway, give it a few days before you visit him. That’s if you’re planning to.”

  “Of course we’ll visit him.”

  Violet hits the back arrow key, reversing her way through the computer’s file structure, opening each pus-coloured directory until she finds what she knew she would find once she gave herself permission to look. In a folder simply marked “Stuff ” are hundreds of pornographic pictures and video clips. She begins to flick through the images, her heart pounding. And yet, as she had found the two times she and Brian watched porn together — and she thought it had been the same for him — the explicit images soon became boring. She finds herself looking for interesting details among the pileups of women with xylophone ribs, dyed-blond hair, shaved pubes, nail extensions, stiletto heels, and bags of silicon inserted under the skin to make enormous breasts. Vibrators, she notes, have become more colourful — more metallic pinks and metallic blues. There are also enormous gel-filled double-headed dildos that in one sequence of photographs are used as connectors, orifice to orifice, to build a human pyramid. The Marquis de Sade would have approved, she thinks. She begins to search the facial expressions of the models for something genuine, something that looks like real feeling. But it is all fake ecstasy on the part of the girls. The men’s faces — when they can be seen — are equally masked: their scowls and grimaces like those of native warriors preparing to engage in ritual combat. In the end, she decides the only expressions that look real are those of discomfort: the worried expression on the face of the Latino girl being sodomized by a Caucasian woman wearing a black strap-on dildo; the soulful eyes of the girl who looks to someone outside the shot, as if for approval.

  Violet thinks about deleting the pictures, replacing them with pictures of their children. But who is she to judge Brian? He is entitled to his secrets, after all. If eroticism is the feather and pornography the whole chicken, who is she to say what might fly? Not all of what she finds is distasteful to her: one video clip shows two young women, both dressed in neatly pressed pyjamas, French kissing. Violet knows it is impossible for a woman to kiss for that long without feeling passion, and she can tell by the way their cheeks began to flush after a few minutes that they are getting really turned on. Kissing defies pornography.

  The video clip takes Violet back to a party she attended shortly after she first met Nancy and Keppie, a year or more before she met Brian. The host was a woman psychiatrist who claimed she had unlimited powers of persuasion. Handing out line after line of cocaine, she boasted that she could get people to do almost anything she wanted. It was all a matter of suggestion, she said. Violet was new in town and new to the women’s studies program. She was eager to prove herself, or, as she would have put it at the time, eager to actualize some of the ideas about gender roles and sexuality she had been absorbing. It was also her first time trying cocaine — “The Devil’s dandruff,” Keppie called it. Each time the Snow White mirror came around she snorted a little more, and the effect of each line was to erase in her another layer of inhibition. Of course that wasn’t how Violet would have described it at the time; that night, in a room full of flickering candles, she was persuaded she had broken through to the Violet she had long felt as a shadow presence, a seminal sister self who had remained tantalizingly out of reach.

  The night ended with Nancy, Keppie and Violet crammed into a twin bed in a room with red velvet wallpaper. Unforgettable was the sight of Keppie, perched like some snuffling gargoyle on the footboard, his eyes out on stalks as he watched to see what they would do. They didn’t do much, and yet on more than one occasion afterwards, Violet finds herself recalling the feeling of Nancy’s naked body against hers, her surprisingly passionate kiss.

  The next morning Nancy was the only one who could see the funny side of it. Alert to their embarrassment, it was she who proposed that they file it under the heading: Experimental College Years. They spoke about that night only once more after that, when Brian and Violet began to get serious about one another. Violet said it would be better if Brian never knew.

  Violet shuts off the computer and walks down the hall, peeking in on the kids who are both snoring. The bug lamp cast a warm purple glow through its shell. Violet close
s her eyes and inhales: crayons, zinc cream, a waft of pee from the diaper bucket and something else indescribably sweet: an essence that reminds her for the millionth time that she will put up with anything for her children.

  As she turns and walks down the hallway to her bedroom, she thinks about Brian, out there somewhere, in God knows what state. How can she say that his collection of smutty pictures is the cause of the growing distance between them? More likely it is a symptom. Violet recognizes her role in bringing them to where they are. How long have they been going through the motions? How long have they operated under the belief that if they stay faithful to one another their love will come flooding back again, when conditions allow. Violet loves Brian. She knows this. But what does she do with the knowledge that these days it takes at least a bottle of wine to make her want him. She thinks again of that Oscar Wilde poem: “For each man kills the thing he loves/ But each man does not die.” God, she hates poetry.

  Undressing and getting into bed, Violet remembers the first time they visited Wallace at the hospital: his bloated body draped obscenely in loose sweats, his shaved head. Gone was his witty conversation, the jewellery, the rack of Adidas tracksuits. They found it shocking to see him that way, like a giant baby, tied down to the bed. And no matter how much he had improved afterwards, it was this image of him that stuck.