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 his sake, guessing that the others’ reports – Jem’s, Cora’s, the professor’s, Robert’s (although one might forgive his unwillingness to speak, what with the facial wounds virtually ensuring that his lips were sealed) – had probably all been made mundane by each of their futile struggles for objectivity. Oh, she thought now, gently rubbing the last, succulent memories of her nocturnal swim out from between the sweet-smelling rolls of her belly, I’ll have to give the constable Dr. Amicable’s manuscript of Shakely’s journal just so that, even if he never discovers the truth of the crime, he will at least have a hint of how such a thing might be inspired.
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
