Autopsy of a Boring Wife Page 16
“You’re Facebook friends?”
“Everyone is friends with everyone on all kinds of social media. You’re one of only three or four people in North America who isn’t.”
“I forgot.”
“Are you on the road?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How do you feel? You sound calm.”
“I’m okay.”
In truth, my head was pounding so badly I had to squint to concentrate. I could see the highway ahead; I could drive as far north as I wanted, abandon my car on the side of a forgotten road somewhere, and walk to the nearest unnamed lake to examine its depths. The depths are where I’d spend the winter, hiding among the frogs.
“My kids will have a new brother or sister.”
“Or both. There’s an epidemic of twins going on these days.”
“My children’s family is growing, but not my own. It’s like someone hit pause, but I’m the only one who actually stopped. I’m frozen in the background while everyone else keeps going.”
“You’re not on pause, Diane. You’re just taking a different path.”
“I was supposed to be on the same one as them.”
“I know.”
“It’s like we’re all walking in the woods together, and Jacques tells them, ‘Quick! If we go this way, your mother will never see us.’ And now I’m in the woods all alone . . . ”
“I know.”
“Philippe didn’t go start another family.”
“No, but my kids hide out in the woods every other week. And the week I have them, I have to look for them just the same.”
“ . . . ”
“Diane, you’re allowed to be pissed off, but don’t do anything stupid.”
“I have to stop somewhere for gas. And I’m in slippers.”
“Slippers?”
“Long story.”
“Call me later?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You won’t do anything dumb, will you?”
“I left the sledgehammer at home.”
“Love you, old broad.”
I filled the tank, gulped down a dishwater-flavoured coffee, and drove straight home. I didn’t know what else to do.
After pulling into the driveway, I turned off the engine and sat there behind the wheel. I let the pain wash slowly over me, like a tide pulled gently by the movement of the stars. Let it come. I no longer had the strength to run away. I opened my mouth and let the moans, wails, and shouts escape. I clung to the wheel, my whole body a sound box, and screamed with all the strength I could muster. I was screaming like someone being tortured, desperately trying to kill the sickness inside. Once I’d emptied my lungs, I took a deep breath and started all over again, trying to push my cries farther, louder, stronger. I wanted the windshield to shatter, the car to explode. When I felt my vocal cords started to tire, I redoubled my efforts, determined to stretch them until they burst. Rage fuelled rage; unending pain ran down my neck in little rivulets. My innards would end up slipping out of my body like a string of sausages. I would purge myself until there was nothing left of me but skin. I would die.
I was well on my way down a fatal path of self-evisceration when I felt a hand close around my arm.
“Diane! Diane!”
Tattoo Guy from the construction site down the street was crouched next to me, head lowered so he could look up at me.
“You’re okay, you’re okay . . . ”
I was gasping for air as if I’d just run a marathon. My face was covered in tears, snot, drool — anything a body produces when it goes into panic mode. The bloated feeling of my eyes and mouth told me my face was swollen. The veins in my temples were pounding to the rhythm of my broken heart.
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
My hand swept the air from left to right. Apart from a sore throat and a headache — and the numbness of my feet — there was nothing to report.
“Can I take you to the hospital?”
“No.”
“A clinic?”
“No.”
“Can I call anyone for you?”
“No.”
“Do you think you can get out of the car?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll take care of it. Want a tissue?”
It must be worse than I thought.
“Yes.”
“KLEENEX, GUYS! NO AMBULANCE, SHE JUST WANTS KLEENEX!”
Mrs. Nadaud came running out with a damp facecloth and a box of tissues, free hand clasped around her jacket collar. She reminded me of my mother, who’d been dead for so long that I’d lost the habit of thinking about her in difficult times. I whispered “Mom,” just to feel the effect of the word on my tongue. The urge to cry sprung up like a geyser, coming at me all the way from my distant thirties. I blew my nose hard enough to bury my sobs. Mom.
Despite the carnage of my face, Tattoo Guy came a few inches closer. I could feel the heat coming off his body. I hadn’t noticed that I was completely frozen.
“Would you like to go home?”
I glanced past his head to my house, anchoring his suggestion in reality. My house was behind him, and light years away from me.
“Uh-huh.”
“All right then, put your arms around my neck, I’ll take you in.”
“No . . . ”
“Yes. You can’t stay here.”
Before I could get a word in, he slipped his arm of steel under my legs and swept me up. Fortunately, I hadn’t peed myself. The day I sunk to my lowest point, I was carried across the doorstep like a young bride.
“Nice slippers.”
He deposited me in an armchair in the living room and knelt down in front of me. If it hadn’t been so much like Jacques’s proposal, classic to the core, I’d have found it endearing.
“There must be someone you want to call?”
“Not yet.”
“I don’t think I should leave you alone.”
“I’m tired. I’m just so tired . . . ”
“Bad news really takes it out of you.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I need to get back to work. But I’m not far — let me know if you need anything.”
“I’ll yell if I need you.”
His lips pulled back and he let out a little laugh, then leaned in closer and hugged me like an old friend. He held me so tight and for such a long time that I was able to close my eyes and rest my head on his shoulder in delicious abandon. Enfolded in his magnificent arms, my woes suddenly seemed negligible. The fragments of my shattered soul settled one by one in the folds of his neck, a store of pain to be swept away. My body drank up his warmth, his calm, his gentleness.
If it hadn’t been for the woman with flaming hair keeping watch underneath his plaid jacket, we might have kissed. His prickly cheek gently grazed mine before he pulled away. Our lips almost touched. I took everything he offered.
After he left, Cat-in-the-box came out of hiding and snuggled up against my neck. He nibbled my earring and then fell back into a deep sleep full of nervous twitches. After a thousand therapeutic caresses, I gratefully nodded off with him.
* * *
When I opened my eyes, Claudine was standing above me with a giant platter of sushi, wearing the sad smile she reserved for the worst days.
“Come on, we’re celebrating your new life. I brought an excellent bottle of temporary solution.”
“ . . . ”
“I know you don’t feel like it, but it’ll be good for you. Don’t move, I’ll take care of everything!”
“Claudine?”
“Yeah?”
“I lost my rebound.”
“Oh, sweetie . . . ”
20
In which I see myself in the mirror
My hairdresser was running late. I sat dow
n on her Louis XVI sofa and pretended, as usual, to be looking for a new style or colour in one of the fashion magazines randomly scattered across the coffee table. It hardly mattered. Whatever bold decisions I’d made in the moments before seeing the scissors invariably vanished the second I sat down in Sabrina’s chair. But my determination to embrace current trends crumbled in the face of my boring nature, manifested right down to my choice of hairstyle.
“So what are we doing today?”
“The usual.”
The girl Sabrina had just finished with — the one responsible for the delay — was raving ecstatically about the pink fade now visible, after lots of bleaching and colouring, in the last ten inches of her hair.
“This is exactly what I wanted! I love it! My friends are going to be so jealous. Mom’s on her way over to pay you.”
In the back, a woman as round as a marble was talking to Eve, the other stylist.
“I want to change it up. I look a bit severe. Do you think my face would seem a little longer if we added a touch of colour on the sides?”
“You don’t have the length for that. We can play a little with the cut to get the effect you want.”
“But what if we put a little red here, on top? Wouldn’t that look nice?”
The woman had managed to convince herself that a few coloured highlights would make her look several kilos lighter. Human nature lives by hope — it’s one of our greatest talents. We feed off illusions that help us escape, if only for a moment, the harshness of reality.
“That might look nice, but we’d have to bleach first to get the right colour.”
“Is that absolutely necessary?”
“If you want a nice, bright red, then you don’t really have a choice.”
“All right then, let’s do it!”
She giggled happily, excited at the transformation she was about to undergo, counting on a little colour to boost her look and morale. Her pudgy little fingers danced with glee in the air.
I noticed my reflection in the large mirror at the back. Grey roots; the calculated pose of an older woman. I was there for the illusion, just like everyone else.
“Hey, Diane, so you want the usual? ”
“Actually, I’d like to go back to my natural colour.”
“This is too dark for you?”
“No, my real natural colour.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Grey.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m serious.”
She looked at me in the mirror, trying to figure out what was going on. I could understand. Most women try to hide their age, not throw themselves headlong at it. But she wouldn’t give me a lecture. Sabrina asks few questions, does good work, does it fast, and doesn’t tell me her life story.
“I’ll give you grey highlights and try to make them as close to your natural colour as possible. That way the grey will come in gradually. We’ll do touch-ups every two or three months. In two years, you’ll be all grey.”
“I’d rather cut it off right away.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“A chin-length bob. That way the grey will grow in quicker, no?”
“That would look amazing, but I need you to promise me you won’t regret it.”
She swivelled the chair around and looked me in the eyes, eyebrows raised.
“I promise.”
“A few months ago, I had a client come in here asking for a cut like Jennifer Lawrence.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“It doesn’t matter. She had hair halfway down her back and she wanted me to cut it short.”
“Oh!”
“So I did. It looked amazing — everyone in the salon thought so. We took pictures of her before she left and everything. But she came back a week later and yelled at me!”
“What? Why?”
“She regretted it. Said she was feeling down when she came in and that I should have tried to stop her.”
“You poor thing.”
“I don’t do refunds and I can’t glue back hair once it’s cut.”
“What did you do?”
“I made her sit down and cool off, then I showed her how to style it with mousse and everything. Silly girl, she had no clue how to do it. It looked awful, all flattened to her head. You’ve got to style a cut like that. I gave her some sculpting gel.”
“That was nice of you.”
“And I told her to leave me the dates of her period for next time.”
“Hah! Don’t worry about me, I’m sure this is what I want.”
“Good. Okay, let’s do it.”
Two and a half hours later, I took my first selfie with Sabrina, who showed me how to upload a picture to Facebook. Everyone thought I looked great. Likes, hearts, and positive comments (“Nice!” “I love it!”) popped up from everywhere. Nobody would do a double-take when they saw me. Friends and acquaintances could discuss my new look behind my back and speculate on my mental state. That’s the advantage of social media: whether it’s a breakup, a baby, or a haircut, the initial shock is mediated by the screen.
“Do you know a good real estate agent? A really nice one?”
She pointed to a stack of business cards next to the register.
“He’s a friend. Super-professional and super-sweet, not your average sleazeball.”
“Thanks. Can I say you gave me his name?”
“Sure, he’s one of my brother’s friends.”
“I met with one last week and it was awful. Just the smell of him was unbearable.”
“You’ll see, this guy’s a real gem. Damn, you look good. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this sooner!”
My hair stylist does on the outside what my therapist does on the inside: helps me feel beautiful.
When the mother of the girl with pink highlights showed up, she was taken aback.
“What’s going on? What did you do?”
“We gave her a nice fade . . . wait, you didn’t know?”
“Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Oh my God!”
“What colour is that?”
“Pink.”
“Pink? Are you serious?”
“It’s all the rage right now!”
“And how much does this hot new look cost?”
“Sit down first.”
“No. No, no, no. How much?”
“Well, we had to bleach it twice and then do three rounds of highlights . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“Two hundred and forty-five dollars.”
“What? Christ, she’s got nerve. It’s like she thinks I shit money. I’d never even spend that on myself!”
I looked in the mirror, and the woman staring back had magnificent grey highlights she’d paid for with her severance package. She knew full well that it made her look her age.
She didn’t seem unhappy.
• • •
* * *
I needed to see the agent arrive. Say what you will about not judging a book by its cover — I think the cover gives you a very good idea of what’s inside.
He showed up at the time we’d agreed on, punctual as a private investigator in a mud-streaked Subaru Outback. Without meaning to, I noticed that his wheels weren’t mounted on mags (Antoine once told me guys who are into cars see them as an extension of themselves — they’ll never go out in public without mags). He was wearing dark jeans and a navy polo, no jacket or dress shoes. It was a casual look, maybe too casual — I seemed overdressed next to him. And he was younger than I was expecting. In his late thirties, maybe. Bushy eyebrows. If he’d let his hair grow, he would have had a monk’s crown.
“Hello! Ms. Delaunais?”
“Stéphane?”
“Yes.”
“
Do you mind if we use first names?”
We sat on the back deck, in chairs I’d carefully dried off. I needed to have some idea who I was dealing with before letting him cast a professional eye on my interior. I’d done the same thing with my dentist.
He pulled out a pad of lined paper and an HB pencil like the kind I used to buy the kids for school. The agent I’d met with the previous week had made my head swim with digital presentations and visual touring software before we’d even agreed to work together. I should have sent him packing after his first “ma’am.” But I had a good feeling about this man, with his unbleached teeth and student’s face. He looked me in the eye with a serious expression.
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“No.”
He suppressed an awkward laugh. We’d stick to the essentials, that would be enough.
“No problem. Excuse me.”
“I want to sell my house because I want to move. That’s it.”
I must have seemed idiotic, but I didn’t care. I had no desire to tell him about my marital problems. No more him than anyone else, for that matter. If buyers wanted to know why I was selling, he could say what I’d just told him — which, after all, was the truth. I wanted to move. My motivations were nobody’s business.
“Perfect. Are you in a rush to sell, Ms. Delaunais?”
“Diane.”
“Excuse me. Are you in a rush to sell, Diane?”
“It depends on what that means.”
“Do you have an ideal date in mind?”
“I don’t want to be here for Christmas.”
In my worst nightmares, I pictured myself alone at the head of a ridiculously long table, no one else around, staring down at a camel-sized turkey sitting in its juice. The TV was on to keep me company and Miracle on 34th Street was playing in all its faded glory.
“All right, then you have three options: (a) ‘I’ve got all the time in the world,’ (b) ‘I want to sell, but at asking price,’ and (c), the more aggressive ‘I’ve got to get the hell out of here.’
“How does the aggressive option work?”
“I get a team to come in and stage the house, we list it a tad below market price to bring out the offers and maybe even start a bidding war, and I offer the other agent a good cut. It might only take a weekend.”