She meditated on Dr. Amicable’s words, her admiration for his passion unlikely to become anything veneratory, it having reached a level beyond the erotic. But there was something about Shakely’s artlessness that she was finding more and more appealing, more visceral, the longer she allowed herself to live within the over-wrought aestheticism of her own mind. Giggy gulped some more beer and ran the long nail of her left pinky along the edge of the chaise longue, surprised to find it snag on a slit in the material. This lazy sew struck the matriarch as not simply unfortunate but embarrassing, even peculiar. The whippet’s effort to steal her attention failed. The chaise longue, like much of her furniture, had come from her deceased mother’s long-since-demolished-but-once-five-star hotel in Zurich, the Ambassador’s Arms. Home Away from Home, for Ambassadors and Kings. A tear in the fabric of the furniture was a tear in the fabric of her memory.
Giggy’s concerns about the material were rooted in the images that she recalled of herself as a pert thing curled up on the chaise while Mama played the piano in her eccentric way – charming, really, with a pained anxiety coming through in the brief silence that foreshadowed each sudden poke of Mama’s only index finger. Watching her play, one could not help but think of a chicken learning to type – an impassioned chicken, unquestionably, but still … These fond, formative memories made it all the more troublesome to imagine that the piano and the chaise longue, which had all this time remained as united as wealthy Siamese twins, might soon be separated. They were all she had left of her childhood and now she was giving one of them up to the constable’s charity bazaar. She could still hear Mama, in a continental English as reassuring as a receding thunderstorm, proudly inform the baronets who sojourned every season on their way to the Black Forest mineral baths, of the refinement of the hotel. ‘Five stars, five of them, dahrlinggs,’ she would zsazsa. ‘It takes talent to whip up a hotel like this one. A bucket of talent. And I’ve got a bucket.’ The memory brought back to Giggy her mother’s last years of pain, of waning hope – not pride, as the daughter had once thought, but desperation. One recurring image, only one, as Giggy left in search of her destiny – that of Mama standing as glorious as a Rhode Island Red next to the piano, wagging the pointed nail of a finger in warning. The sun ricocheted off the mother’s aurora of auburn hair. It was the brilliance of the locks, Giggy later lied, that caused her to tear. Oh yes, Giggy had her own bucket, a bucket full of painful memories. If only she could sell them, she thought, instead of the furniture.
‘You’re right,’ volleyed Jem, tugging absent-mindedly on a lone chest hair. ‘Those big old geese could make a V from behind, and they could also make an R. Or an O. Or a B.’ A single tear as plump as the central diamond in the tiara of the Infanta of Paraguay squeezed itself from the duct tucked into the boy’s lower left lid. ‘I do believe they could probably make just about any letter under the heavens and still make a V from below.’ Now he stretched his coltish legs into a V as a visual aid, remembering his childhood swims in Catahoula Lake under the full Louisiana moon, the way in which the sweet, muddy waters pulled him forward as he stepped gingerly along the soft, grey depths shifting below, the way in which the mud-blind fish and weedy banners caressed his calves and thighs. Waist-deep, he would turn like Salomé to face the white virgin moon, the summer air warm yet chilling his skin, the orb’s beams piercing his body like a promise, his then hairless chest breaking into goosebumps while his scrotum receded into his body like a bashful snail into its shell. Silver swamp daffodils, their petals stiff-shut, swayed over the jet waters, each stem holding a perfect whiplash curve.
The young man’s eyes focused on the drapes of mosquito netting that clung around the front of the house like a giant hairnet. The bugs had begun to bother, all spindly and aggressive – blackflies, deer flies, gnats, an everglade’s worth of mosquitoes, all incessantly spinning tangles of anxiety and illness in the dustless air.
‘No, not any letter. I can’t imagine an O,’ said Giggy.
‘Oh well, dear, if you can’t imagine it …,’ half-attentive.
‘Well I can’t, love, or an X for example. It would take a lot of Canada geese to make an X in the sky, yes? I wonder how many geese it would take to spell FOX. And with their heads and legs, because you’d have to view them from behind for that, wouldn’t they look more like asterisks? Animals are so self-serving; they’d only do it if it suited them. But humans … well, humans aren’t much different.’
If a V, thought Jem, then why not an X? Wasn’t it just two hip-joined Vs?
It had been all Giggy could do to convince Constable Loch that the Queen Anne chaise longue had no part in the crime – even though, since Cora had been staying in the Winter Garden for some time now, Giggy was herself unsure, although unadmittedly so. It was that smear of scarlet, the size of a small palm print, but which she clearly recalled as pomegranate juice she had spilt herself years and years ago, that had made Queen Anne suspect. Province states had crumbled for less, she mused concernedly, Bethgoz-Lisotania, to name what for Giggy was but the most obvious example.
Not that she would ever join the community in its defamation of Cora. Indeed she couldn’t imagine any one person, let alone the toned but tiny Cora, having the strength or agility to remove all those rectangular strips of flesh from a body in protest. And who would have cleaned up all the mess, the spills of blood that had to have been left behind? There were no traces of cleaning supplies to be found and there must have been so much blood on those craggy stones. And Cora was, well, brittle, wasn’t she? Is ‘brittle’ not the kindest word in this case? She was young only in years, that one. Her maturity pressed down upon joie like a stack of encyclopedias on a maple leaf.
Giggy was not guilty of assuming that Cora’s earnestness and caution (she avoided calling it conservatism) were the visitor’s fault. It was something arising through Cora’s interaction with the rest of society or, more precisely, arising from the pressures it forced on her. As such, these traits of respectability and precision did not belong to Cora, but existed in a space between her and society. Their contours could be read on the surface of her body but they were nevertheless the product of external influences, like body paint or a second skin.
Giggy was correct in deducing that Cora wore her wounds with pride, and that this was necessary if she were to protect her sense of identity. The girl had been travelling with Jem for who knew how long, in the United States and now here in Canada. She looked only a few years older than him, but she was definitely the chaperone. Giggy could see that many would feel that her nephew was both feeble and egotistical. But Cora, she saw in him the kind of person that she was destined to support – such a one as she herself might have become had she not been queer and a woman. And so Giggy recognized her younger self in Cora’s overreliance on melancholy as a form of joy, on contentment as fulfilment. The matriarch could only hope that Cora’s growing love for Jem (for she truly believed that all must eventually love him) would allow her to shed some defences. He may not teach her to swim through the onslaught of vindictiveness and malice as he did, as if it were only the exhaust and whine of a Sea-Doo. But for now, Cora could at least manoeuvre in his wake and learn that indifference was at times the most effective form of self-defence.
Cora’s high valuation of responsibility, Giggy felt, meant that she had the patience, but not the adventurousness, to have peeled the strips of skin off Robert. The older woman could not help but wonder, as well, how patient Robert had to have been to have let himself be so ensnared. It almost frustrated her, the sense that his point of view, the unique materiality of his experience, was just beyond the grasp of her clumsy fingers. Giggy had once watched Lady Clasp, who lived across the east field, use a pair of tweezers to strip the skin from boiled tomatoes. After the roiling water had inflamed the pieces of fruit, their tissued skin puckered, seeming to beg to be pulled back. The veterinarian, her flaming locks hairnetted,