Autopsy of a Boring Wife Page 12

  “No, that doesn’t help.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He left without another word, leaving me alone with a packet that had enough poison in it to ruin my life — or the illusion I’d had of it, until then. Stacked an inch high, these neatly bundled papers were certain to cast a harsh light over events of the last year and a half, pulling me out of the darkness. I might never recover.

  My break had been done for some time when the server came by to ask if I wanted anything else. I tried to smile back, but the attempt must have been pathetic, and he lowered his eyes and went to wipe down another table. He probably believed the detective was my lover and that he’d come to dump me.

  I texted the secretary of my department to say I’d been held up, I’d be back as soon as possible. It was the first time I’d ever asked her to cover for me. She didn’t ask why.

  “All good. Take as much time as you need.”

  I took a gulp of cold coffee, and let my eyes wander around the room. At one of the tables in the back, right next to the tree growing there — I never understood how a live tree could grow inside the restaurant — I spotted Mr. Dutronc, director of the Exports department. He was rarely in the office, his work demanding that he travel all over to set up business deals. Sales had tripled since I’d started at the company, owing to the tentacles it dispatched to the four corners of the planet; our payslips, on the other hand, amounted to the same. Most of the contact we had with upper management was limited to unbearable speeches we were forced to sit through over breakfast meetings intended to help us maintain our ISO rating, among other things. During these trimesterly meetings — trimenstrually, you could say, given how excruciating they were — I gorged on pastries to distract myself from the hollow words of our deep-pocketed execs.

  Mr. Dutronc was speaking animatedly to a pretty young woman — too pretty and too young, actually — who I recognized. She was one of two new interns we’d met at the previous breakfast seminar. I forgot which department she was in, but remembered her name, Gabrielle, because that’s what I would have named Charlotte had Jacques let me. The poor girl was no doubt having to endure the old man’s habitual litany of commercial “exploits” — enough to make you shudder — as he dressed them up in a bunch of other, equally dubious metaphors. Clients, first and foremost, needed to be “seduced,” “charmed,” “sucked off,” and otherwise led down the rosy path and brought dangerously close to the act itself, at which point it was easy to close the deal. (“For the love of God, they’re only words!”) Both parties, it seems, would be satisfied only once their mutual liquidity was established — “Ha hah, liquidity, liquids! . . . ” Duprick, more like it. But much as I found our own encounters pathetic, he was harmless as long as it was all talk. It was much more worrying to see him, clearly in a position of authority, trying his patter on a young, vulnerable girl.

  Discreetly, I kept watching to garner a sense of what was going on. Gabrielle was nodding at everything, nervously twirling a strand of hair, frenetically looking at her phone, fiddling with her nails, her lips, the palm of her left hand, and the corner of the table. Clearly, she was uncomfortable. I wanted to offer her my hand and say, “Come on, sweetie, let’s get out of here.” Every fibre of my motherly being was sounding the alarm. If it were Charlotte backed up against the wall like that, I’d have gouged out the man’s eyes.

  Those were the thoughts running through my mind when I saw the pervert’s gummy hand cover her pale fingers like a dark cloud. What with the way her arm tensed it was easy to see she wanted to get away from him. Sensing that she might actually manage to, he’d closed his other hand over hers in a vice-like grip, forcing her to look up at him. I shot out of my chair. “GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER RIGHT NOW! Don’t even try it, you old asshole, she’s not into you. You could be her grandfather! You don’t scare me, even with your cash and filthy lawyers. I FILMED THE WHOLE THING, DUPRICK, YOU’RE IN THE SHIT! Ever heard of social media? If I were you I’d be really worried because the second someone starts digging a little deeper they’ll realize you’re rotten to the bone. There are a ton of journalists who’d love to expose a rat’s ass like you for what you really are — that’s what sells papers these days, sad as it is. I bet you spent the past thirty years letting your hands go wherever they want. But listen up — this is how it’s going to work from now on: don’t you EVER touch this girl again, or any other girl for that matter. NO ONE GAVE YOU THE RIGHT! If I ever hear you’ve crossed the line, I’ll make your head spin — and that’s not a metaphor. So you’re going to walk out of here and tell all your little buddies with wandering fingers that the days when work was an open bar are over, dipshit. You got that? OVER!”

  I kept hitting the table with my index finger until it hurt. Every syllable, bam! Every exclamation point, bam! I didn’t even stop when my fingernail broke.

  “Ma’am?”

  “ . . . (SHUT UP! I’M TALKING!)”

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “Oh dear!”

  Getting up, I’d overturned my chair and the syrupy contents of my coffee were spilling across the table and pouring over the edge. The people around me were doing one of two things: staring at me, or trying not to stare at me. A safety valve had blown somewhere in my brain, suddenly blocking the words before they could escape. Still. I might have murmured something, it’s hard to know. In any case, I was used to looking like a madwoman.

  The director had repatriated his hands. He looked at me without actually seeing me, the nameless employee. I unclenched my teeth ever so slightly and walked out. Just another thing to feel ashamed of: my cowardice.

  * * *

  Back at the office, Lynne was waiting impatiently.

  “Accounting called about the Murdoch file. It seemed pretty important.”

  “Oh, yes, it is. Thanks. I’ll take care of it.”

  “The colour palette came in for the new desks, take a look. If you ask me, the beige is verging on pink and the burgundy’s too dark.”

  I chose the goose-poop greenish yellow, the ugliest colour of them all: I felt like sticking it to my desk. Management must have had friends in Furnishing looking to rid the company of desks that weren’t selling to even propose such hideous colours, pals who delivered bloated invoices for short elevator trips.

  I walked into my office and collapsed in my chair. Nerves had exhausted me, and suddenly my legs weren’t responding. I was still holding the hefty envelope of shame in one trembling hand and had started to hate the detective who’d amassed it by digging through my life and Jacques’s, for all his ill-concealed crimes. He was supposed to repair my honour, to have restored it to me intact by virtue of a few expeditious, well-formulated sentences judiciously dispersed in a reassuring report. But he’d poked around in what I didn’t want to know. Pressing down on the envelope with the entire weight of my body, I measured it: one inch. I broke the seal to feel the paper stock. Standard thickness with no card cover, it was an inch of grief on ordinary, partially recycled paper. I shoved all of it back into the envelope.

  Claudine had stayed home with her nice new cast on. The fracture didn’t prevent her from working, but she was taking a bit of time off to recover from the emotional strain. I called to check in on her and told her I’d managed to ruin all that remained of my life in the space of a coffee break. What can I say? I might be boring, but I’m efficient.

  17

  In which I examine the envelope and eat apple pie

  Once home, I left the envelope in the car deliberately. I wanted time to think about what would happen if I opened it. I needed to feel my way around the abyss before throwing myself in.

  It was nearly midnight when I left the house in my bathrobe to retrieve it, terrified a thief might stumble across it and parade my cuckolded existence across social media. I still had no idea what the damn envelope even contained. And that’s when I saw the Nadauds in their kitchen, bright as the day
, eating, a good six hours later than most. Despite the cold and my being so inappropriately dressed, I stood in the driveway, watching them cut into their food with knife and fork. A couple of ordinary people eating in the middle of a very bizarre scene. I needed to take a closer look, and I had the perfect excuse.

  Mr. Nadaud came to the door.

  “Good evening!”

  “Good evening.”

  “I wanted to apologize for the leaf blower. I’ll replace it, of course.”

  “No need, I fixed it up and it’s good as new.”

  “Oh, good! But still, I’m sorry for going at it like a wild thing. I really lost it back there.”

  His wife had just appeared behind him. She was clutching the collar of her sweater as women of a certain age do when they’re afraid of catching cold.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she chimed in, “we know you’ve had it rough lately. It’s no joke what you’re going through, we understand.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “And please forgive him, too. He can get so annoying about the lawn. It’s practically a disease. Me, I’d have done the same as you, Mrs. Valois — oh! I’m so sorry, you must be using your maiden name again.”

  “I never took my husband’s name, actually. Mine is Delaunais, but it’s not a big deal.”

  “Would you like to come in for a piece of apple pie? I just took it out of the oven.”

  And that’s how I found myself in my pyjamas in the Nadauds’ kitchen at 12:13 a.m., chatting about the weather and eating apple pie. It was like a scene out of a David Lynch movie. It wouldn’t have surprised me if their cat had suddenly started talking.

  “Forgot something in your car?”

  “Yes, some papers.”

  “In a brown envelope? Ha ha! Sorry.”

  “Ha! I know what you’re thinking. But no, it’s not money. It’s a top secret file.”

  “Best not to take chances, someone might steal it. Especially if it’s top secret.”

  “Can I ask you a question? It’s a little nosy.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you always eat this late?”

  They flashed each other a sheepish look, as if I’d asked something truly intimate — like whether or not they still shared a bed.

  “We’ve been doing so for a while, now. After we retired, it just sort of happened.”

  “We didn’t really notice at first.”

  “Since we no longer have any reason to get up early, we’ve been sleeping in later and later.”

  “And staying up later and later. Now that we can record TV shows, we watch practically everything that’s on.”

  “Do you watch any of the American shows?”

  “Oh yes! We’re really into Game of Thrones these days.”

  “We’re always trying to predict what’s going to happen next.”

  “So our days sort of ended up flipped around.”

  “Kind of like teenagers.”

  “Maybe. We never had kids.”

  “And we started working when we were teenagers ourselves.”

  They looked at their hands, the floor, then back up to the table, as if their thoughts had to make the sign of the cross before they could be expressed.

  “I needed a hysterectomy the year we were married.”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry.”

  “No worries. It was a long time ago.”

  The way the words came out, I could tell she’d uttered them so many times they’d lost all meaning.

  “Sorry about the bathrobe, I know it’s weird. I was already in bed when I remembered the . . . the envelope.”

  “Sorry about our weekday habits, they’re pretty weird too.”

  Then I remembered the Nadauds had the strange habit of wearing matching clothes according to the day of the week. You could set your watch by them. Alexandre had pointed it out to me soon after they’d moved in some fifteen years ago. (They’d sold their property in the city and used the money to buy a quiet place to retire in the suburbs.) That day — that day and night — they were wearing their “Monday clothes”: grey pants and a navy shirt. The tops and bottoms were always the same colour, but in different styles. Practical for laundry, if less so for fashion. What’s more, the sizes were completely off, either they’d put on weight without realizing it or their clothes had shrunk in the dryer. That said, when it comes to an unlikely reconciliation between neighbours discussing a lost uterus in the middle of the night over slices of apple pie, clothes don’t matter all that much.

  “Actually, another reason I came over is to see if you’d still like to mow my lawn. It would be a big help. I’ll pay, of course.”

  “Out of the question! It would be my pleasure, a neighbourly service.”

  It wasn’t true. I’d been determined to stand my ground when it came to the lawn, but the apple pie we’d shared in a world of such abysmal loneliness had melted my obstinacy. Even though I hate the word, it’s the one that suits: I pitied them. Their tedium, thick as tar, hindered their movements and their voices. Everything about them was dull and grey, from the small porcelain cat to the painting, hanging on a beige wall, of a birch on a dismal plain. A few years from now, someone would find them mummified in their kitchen, their matching weekday outfits hopelessly faded. And I’d given them so much trouble about the lawn!

  I left, feeling strangely alive in the biting cold of the night. I even stopped for a moment as I crossed my overgrown field, closed my eyes, and pictured myself far away in space and time in the midst of a wild grassland. The heat my clothes had retained was leaving me, molecule by molecule. If I remained still, not fighting the wind, perhaps I’d disintegrate altogether, my bones sprinkling the ground in a snowy powder. Disappearing that way would be just fine. I’d be everywhere and nowhere at once, any efforts to find me both easy and difficult.

  Over the next few days I hid the envelope in different places, imagining I’d stop thinking about it if I buried it deeper and deeper in the recesses of my house. After trying all the closets, the bottom of cupboards, the dryer, different mattresses, bookshelves and filing cabinets (pursuing this logic, the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest), I ended up finding the perfect place, possibly too perfect — the hole I’d “inadvertently” made in the living room wall when I’d smashed the couch apart. I rolled up the envelope and slipped it into the opening. On the other side it unfolded itself and fell a few feet down to land between two wall studs. It would be impossible for me to retrieve it without opening up the wall to the floor. And what with the kids coming over on Saturday, it wasn’t the time to start renovating.

  • • •

  * * *

  J.P. returned to the office on Thursday, as expected. Josée-Josy stood up when I came in.

  “Hello, Diane!”

  “Hello, Josée!”

  A wrinkle of annoyance appeared between her overly made-up eyes. She wanted nothing to do with her real name, that much was obvious. I smiled as naturally as possible, feigning innocence. Two could play at her game.

  “Is Jean-Paul back?”

  “Yes, he is. But he’s on the phone at the moment. You could come by later. Or would you like to wait?”

  “No thanks.”

  Handsome J.P.’s head appeared in the doorway just as I was turning around.

  “Hello! You came to see me?”

  “Only if you have a couple of minutes.”

  “Josy, can you take messages for the next few minutes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks.”

  Once we sat down, it struck me that sending him a note would have been better.

  “Thank you for the bottles of wine. Really, it was too generous.”

  “I shouldn’t have?”

  “No, you shouldn’t have.”

  “It was my pleasure. Rea
lly. Though I didn’t know if you cared for wine.”

  “Oh, I do. I do. I shared both bottles with Claudine.”

  “Claudine . . . ?”

  “Claudine Poulin, from HR.”

  “Oh, right! She’s cool.”

  “Very. We ended up in the hospital, actually.”

  “Really? Too smashed?”

  “No, no. Well, yes, maybe a little, but it’s a long story . . . do you know Flashdance?”

  “As in ‘What a Feeling’?”

  “You know that song?”

  “Of course!”

  “But it’s such a girly movie!”

  “Exactly. I was really into girls back then, so I was really ‘into’ that movie.”

  “Smart guy.”

  “But why the hospital?”

  “Claudine fell and fractured her arm.”

  “ . . . ”

  He tilted his head up forty-five degrees and turned his palms upward, as in “Is it raining?”

  “Remember the dance where the girl jumps around all over the place?”

  “Yes, of course! The girl who gets a bucket of water dumped on her and then does a pole dance . . . ”

  “Uh, yeah. But I mean the part in the gym, with all the judges.”

  “Sure, sure, I remember. The girl’s all sweaty, she points at the judges . . . ”

  “Exactly! Remember the part when she backs up and does those little kicks?”

  “Yeah . . . ”

  “Well, picture it happening on a deck with no railing.”

  He put his head in both hands before leaning back and letting out a big, guttural laugh. Air coursed through his body with a fabulous abandon. I could just imagine him sitting with the boys, beer in hand and playing cards or watching a hockey game. The sort of bon vivant you come across at Happy Hour, who doesn’t seem to notice the girls devouring the very sight of him between peanuts. While he was laughing so cheerily, I stared at his pink lips until, in my head, we were inches from making out. I leaned over gently, my stomach on fire, my lips touching his as we tilted our heads softly in opposite directions, our tongues warm, wet, longing . . .