The Winter Gardeners. Dennis Denisoff
because, be-caaause,’ Jem softly sang as tears welled up in his eyes for the umpteenth time. Chappy knew what the boy was lamenting but thought it wisest to stay silent rather than join in the grief. During his short career as a green racer, the dog had been muzzle-broken and had learnt well the rewards of silence. So, up against Cora’s still sleeping torso he curled his body and under Giggy’s feet he tucked his nose. Digging his claws into the floorboards of the gazebo, he cast a cautious eye at Jem’s flat lashes as they trapped his salty tears and tangled together like a chorus line of spider legs. Giggy watched the shadow of her own body as, lengthening into the evening, it enwrapped her nephew.
*
Despite the cooling air of the evening, Jem and Giggy continued to wilt at each other from across the coffee table as they watched a V of Canada geese pass over the lake and toward the evergreens that stood in the distance as sturdy as the obelisks of the West Nile and as flat as the black cardboard backdrop of Dante’s Inferno – The Musical that Constable Loch kept in the storage room of the Lake Wachannabee Community Centre.
Upon his arrival at the Winter Garden, Jem’s acts of affection toward his aunt had been fostered by a dutiful sense of reciprocity, but he was now simply pleased to see her happy. Love, he had learnt, did not always take the short and lusty route. This was the passage taken with Robert. His feelings for both his aunt and Robert – even the difference between his early love for Robert and the way that he missed him now – proved to Jem that ‘love’ was not broad enough a term to encompass the range of feelings.
Rob wasn’t sure his feelings for Jem were love. He found the other exotic and affectionate and this, so far, was enough. If anything challenged the wounded man’s fondness, it was Jem’s inertia – no, his complacency regarding his inertia. He was rather young, Robert thought, to be facing his future with indifference, as if all that existed were the moment. Pleasure became gem-like only in comparison to less fulfilling moments. He had, of late, become far more sensitive to the heights of emotion and so much more appreciative. His lover, unfortunately, had not.
Jem’s attention drifted off the V of geese and parachuted down to the dark surface of the lake, pierced here and there now and then by motley flips of fish snipping at the insects that always hovered over the water at sunset. Dr. Amicable’s extremely long and slender canoe created another, more deceptive V cutting a silver slit in the water as it made its way from the public dock back to his cabin for the night. The man’s editing of Shakely’s exploration journals had made him something of a star in the community. The journals were the first extensive account of the Wachannabee region. Dr. Amicable’s English, however, was too inelastic for work on the records of an eighteenth-century Hudson’s Bay explorer, so he had accrued a cluster of eloquent assistants to help him, Rob among them. No doubt the only somewhat literate Robert Shakely never intended his words – ‘No crapping today’ and so on – for so many earnest eyes.
Jem twisted his torso and inhaled a serpentine of cocaine off the mirror tabletop, and then refilled his glass with the Canada Dry and crushed glacial ice that he kept in a small Styrofoam cooler near the divan. This mix had replaced cappuccino slushies as his breuvage de la saison. Living up here, he mused – lying on his back, eyes mesmerized by the golden effervescence in his glass – Auntie must often take pleasure in such exotic northern products. He took a sip, enjoying the cold dribble that ran down his chin and along one of the two grooves on the front of his neck. It inched its way into the slight indent of his chest and more slowly still down to the oxbow lake of his belly button where it pooled lazily and became still.
‘I’m worried that you’re drinking too much of that, dear. Anything habit-forming isn’t worth experiencing twice. And you’ll get to belching. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. Belching – who could say why – seems inevitably to lead to swaggering. And then, well, the slippery slope of slovenliness.’
‘I don’t know that I wouldn’t mind a swagger. It has always added mystery to those who could pull it off. Val Kilmer, for example, or Huckleberry Hound.’
‘Pull what off, dear?’
But this didn’t interest him. ‘I wonder if it looks like a V from directly above.’ He coaxed a bluebottle off his soft left lid but let his lank black hair continue to hang heavy there.
‘A swagger would no doubt work on you, dear – everything does seem to. Still, habits,’ she cautioned maternally, scooping up some beer foam with a flake of her strudel.
‘What do you say?’
‘The flock?’ Her lips pulled forcefully on a Cameo.
‘The wake.’
She stared into the gloaming. ‘Well, it’s definitely a V from above, sweetest, but not from behind,’ and yet, even as she spoke, Giggy realized that one V couldn’t possibly set a standard for all Vs. What one saw from behind could simply be a different V.
‘Oh, but it is from underneath.’
‘Yes, possibly from underneath,’ and then, hoping to help her nephew reach the same realization that she had regarding normativization, she added with forced casualness, ‘it wouldn’t be inappropriate, would it, dear, to consider David Hume at this point. “Skeptic,” you know, needn’t carry wholly negative connotations. I’m sure geese could make a V from behind if they tried. But then, that’s assuming a fair amount of rationality for the fowl, yes? And yet who’s to say that animals don’t act rationally?’
Giggy took a swig of beer, burped sharply (‘I must, for my condition’) and imagined what the wake looked like from beneath, from underwater, her own billowful body naked in the cool night – a moment’s respite from a summer of chafing along the length of her cleavage, under her full breasts, between the rolls on her belly and thighs. On especially hot days, when even the deodorant she smothered under her succulents did not seem to help, she tucked a couple of Cora’s sanitary pads between her flesh and the wire support of her bra to ease the pressure.
Just now, Giggy found sufficient relief in her imaginings. She envisioned her submerged body borne by the black water, her kimono fluttering wet about her in the breezy current as fawn muskellunge and yellow perch flew past with flapping fins and Dr. Amicable’s long and extremely slender canoe slipped over her like one half of a husked pea pod, casting a shadow in the moonlight such that, for a brief moment, her body became an aquatic image of yin and yang. Emerald was the pod and darkest ermine the water as her body bobbed like driftwood, just keeping itself from plunging into the masses of air. ‘So too inspiring,’ she murmured, lowering her torso in its chair as if submerging into a bath. This was not the first time the doctor had rested so comfortably on her mind. But a fraction Giggy’s legs spread, the tips of her bare feet poking out from beneath her Balzacian kimono with the timidity of mice. Jem realized that she was having a vision from beneath the wake of the canoe.
I love her so much more than exotic Canadian products, he thought, more than René Simard’s jumpsuits, more than maple syrup in tiny tin houses that Wachannabee children place in homage at the leathered boots of mounted police, more than the husky-skin culottes in which Québecois mothers swaddle and coddle their tender infants, more than the smoked salmon of … oh so and so and so much more.
Recent discussions of murder had upset Jem’s aunt immeasurably, and he hoped that these briefest suggestions of pleasure were spreading their reassuring warmth, like Tiger Balm on a twisted muscle, below the surface of her skin all the way down to her veins, her heart, the very marrow of her bones. Lost in imaginings, she stretched her feet even further out and stroked the curved leg of some furniture. The act itself was a gesture of reaffirmation, for Giggy was reclining on the very same chaise longue on which Constable Loch had so disdainfully refused to sit only one month ago, choosing instead to splay the girth of his khakied buttocks on a common footstool as he licked the lead of his working-man’s pencil and mapped in only the thinnest trail of her eloquent defence: 5:15, sun setting in the west, flesh aglow as if illuminated from within.
His squatting macho had forced Giggy to admire his chiselled ass despite the fact that his hackneyed shorthand irritated her. That day, she had decided to wax especially baroque for