couldn’t trust whoever it is.’
‘What is a long house?’
‘Don’t you mean log house?’
‘?’
‘I think, actually, it’s “long shirt.”’
Well, maybe everybody didn’t know what it was exactly, but they were all sure that this objet d’approvisionnement had to be singled out for a reason, and they decided without convening that it had to do with murder. There was a crime and now there was a piece of evidence. Somebody cobbled together an auction website – www.giggy.com – and, despite confusion over what a chaise longue was, the bidding had begun. Jem, meanwhile, lived with a constant trace-fear that one day his aunt would discover these posters and confirm the rumours that Dr. Amicable had already passed on to her, and his career as the cook of the Winter Garden would crumple down about his slim, pale feet like a sarong secured too hastily.
Giggy slugged back the last of her beer, rolled her torso gently to the left, then to the right, and then – taking advantage of the momentum – back to the left and slipped the empty into the cardboard case next to the chaise longue. In the same flow of motion, she grasped her Cameos off the table and eased her body back into the sag of the furniture. Eyes heavily linered with affection gazed over at her nephew, who seemed a touch on edge as he sprawled calf-like on the divan which, in order to not break up the set, Giggy had decided to donate to the bazaar as well.
And still unheard was the rumble that Constable Loch’s truck, as it approached, would send over the fields of grain and sunflowers, and so there was nothing for it but to continue spending time in wait. Even the night seemed late this evening.
Aloominium, aloominium.
Kittens, rabbits, kittens, kittens, rabbits.
‘You may be right about the O,’ said Giggy, ‘but the C is a wily mistress.’ She arched her eyebrows and bided a moment before wondering what it was with the youth of today, that they never laughed, but then admitted to herself how insensitive it was to categorize an entire generation with a single mood. And disdainful ennui, of all things. How Dostoevsky, how Ablomov, how Camus. ‘It may appear circular from below (on the page, that is, not the sky) but if you turn it on its side, love, and you have enough geese, you could spell a C. Maybe even an O, though I just can’t imagine … Oh, I guess if you have enough geese you could do just about anything.’ Tilting her head sideways to assist with the mental image, it was only the clatter of her hearing aid (not age, dear, but an overextended encounter with the younger members of a Swiss funtwelscht ensemble) hitting the floor that kept Giggy from tipping out of her seat. She crawled out of her chair quickly to recover the aid before her whippet gobbled it up.
‘I bet Coca-Cola is training geese over northern Montana right now to spell their name,’ Jem contributed. Ah, my little luftmensch, Giggy thought proudly as she poked her nose beneath the Panamanian end table.
Jem was sure that the popularity of the chaise had something to do with the crime committed against Robert. Beautiful Robert, he revived, insouciant Robert, his brackenberry slip of a tongue, his pale smooth flesh like the cream of Holsteins, his eyelids as if brushed by the deepest of Libyan pollen. Soon a veritable diadem of tears began to drip silently onto Jem’s lap. Before Robert had become a victim, Giggy had nicknamed him ‘le petit communiste,’ after the photo by Pierre et Gilles of the milk-skinned Slav with false eyebrows. But this connection had become impossible to maintain ever since rectangles of the young man’s taut flesh had been so meticulously stripped off his body – sections of thighs, ass, chest, arms, neck, even face: primarily the cheeks, chin and forehead, but also a bit of one ear. The sado-masochistic enactment of a blazon. His healthiest pieces of new flesh, those that were not bandaged, ran in rough patches across his thighs and lower abdomen. They reminded Giggy of winter sunburn, smoked salmon, the luminescent apricot chiffon so popular at Midwestern weddings in the 1970s. Initially she had found herself hesitant to tend to these wounds. Jem, conversely, remained committed, inspired by the sensitivity of his partner’s torso. He wanted to take pictures of the damage with Robert’s camera, but he recognized that the passion carried the risk of being psychologically abusive. Mental relaxation was still as important as physical relaxation for the man – not that there was any worry about the latter, thought Jem, since he was almost fully immobilized.
Giggy had taken on the responsibility of turning her nephew’s lover from back to belly or belly to back three times a day, and this new intimacy had been enough to increase her attachment to him, although she dared not nickname her little pumpkin again. There was something in these actions, she realized, that supported a force greater than she could articulate. The regularity and repetition of the assistance created a habit of giving in Giggy’s life that she had not experienced before. It felt to her like a sort of primordial nurturing that lifted her beyond any daily woes. It was as if helping a person with his sorrows, not simply lightening his pain but sharing in it, experiencing the pain felt by another as if for a moment it were one’s own, worked to lessen the discomforts of one’s selfish life. It was, she conjectured, perhaps most akin to what soldiers felt when nursing their companions in battle – a love not only sanctioned but heightened through pain. Spartan.
When she helped Robert shift off his back onto his side, and then let him rest for a moment before turning him onto his belly, her seeing his discomfort was also her participating in it and thus making it something less extreme and lonely than it otherwise would have been. At these moments, Robert’s agony became a shared experience that allowed Giggy to step out of her own identity as the matriarch of the Winter Garden and into a softer role that gave her character roundness. Just as it is that fleeting emotions first attract saints to their calling, so, too, did this experience introduce Giggy into a community that pulsated beyond the patterns and conceits of her town or even those of society in general. It was no less than what the Victorian philosopher Violet Paget had described, as she tended her ailing brother, as the transhistorical empathy that allowed one to feel comfortable in being companioned by the past.
Many called the crime ‘murder’ even though Robert was not dead because, in one of those startling coincidences that so disconcert movie executives, a news story had recently made the rounds describing a murder case in which the methods used were similar to those practiced on Robert, down to the suspected scalpels, the absence of anaesthetic and even the size of the fleshly strips, which ranged in thickness from that of onion skin to a quarter of an inch on the juicier parts of the body. Based on this information and the fact that the victim in the article had died a quick death, the doctors who looked at Robert’s patchwork anatomy claimed that he too was bound to die, unless one could grow back skin, layers and layers and layers of skin. ‘And there isn’t enough time for that, is there?’ the community had chirped into their phones with the harmony of crickets, ‘There just isn’t enough time.’ Cora, who had become understandably defensive in recent weeks as she was more and more frequently murmured to be the prime suspect, had also grown infuriated by this habit among locals of turning every statement they made, every insinuation, every accusation, into a question. It was as if their incessant use of the interrogative somehow emptied their accusations of responsibility, the question mark becoming an upturned ladle out of which poured all the bilious pleasure they found in another’s discomfort, leaving nothing but the empty wooden spoon of a question mark. But this could still be painful enough if rapped against the widow’s peak or at that softer rise of flesh just behind the ear.
Having massaged their conclusions into unanimity, the doctors eventually accepted that the patient would at least die more sympathetically at the Winter Garden than if he were kept in the hospital, and so they asked him if he wished Giggy to take him home. One blink – yes; two blinks – no. The family made its procession from the hospital to the villa: first the ambulance with Robert and Jem in the back, then Giggy and Chappy in the Bricklin – the
