The Dead Husband Project Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2017 SARAH MEEHAN SIRK

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sirk, Sarah Meehan, author

  The dead husband project / Sarah Meehan Sirk.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385687607 (softcover).—ISBN 9780385687614 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8626.E3576D43 2017 C813′.6 C2017-900517-0

  C2017-900518-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Jennifer Griffiths

  Cover image: Still Life with Flowers and a Watch, Abraham Mignon, c. 1660–c. 1679, Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht

  Published in Canada by Anchor Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  To my mother and father

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Dead Husband Project

  Ozk

  Barbados

  Distance

  mommyblogger

  What Happens

  The Centre

  A Road in the Rain

  Inters ection

  In the Dark

  Dreams

  Postcards

  The Date

  Moonman

  Acknowledgements

  THE DEAD HUSBAND PROJECT

  Sweaty, limbs entwined, blankets kicked to the floor.

  Paris.

  Maureen Davis had married Joe McGovern five days earlier in a gown she’d made herself and pinned with flowers that had wilted before midnight. The ceremony bare in an unadorned gallery, the guests unsure whether it was real or performance art or something else altogether until the wine came out and the mini spanakopitas were passed around and Phil dumped a pile of blow on the altar, and then no one seemed to care one way or another. She’d been buoyant that night, her feet hovering inches off the ground as she bobbed along at her new husband’s side through the riotous guests and the churchy scent of burned-out candles.

  Joe rubbed his bare foot against the arch of hers. She shimmied closer over the sheets and pressed her back against him; he wrapped his arm around her waist. They were sticky and hot and smelled of fermented wine and smoky hair and they couldn’t get close enough to each other.

  “Everything enmeshed,” he said, kissing the back of her neck. “Eating, working. Fucking, sleeping. Everything together.”

  Noise from the narrow cobblestone street below wafted up through the heavy, shifting curtains: male voices barking in rapid French, café chairs scraped along time-worn stones, laughter at the expense of someone. Impossible to tell if it was day or night.

  “You say that now.”

  “Now. Always.” He reached for a cigarette and lit it. “Forever and ever, amen.”

  He sat up and clicked on the radio, the ladder of his vertebrae pressing through his freckled back. Something unknowable beneath the surface. But she knew, knew each bend and curve and divot and mole. She traced her finger down the lowest part of his spine.

  He took a long drag. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’ve got this idea. It would be collaborative.”

  He passed her the cigarette. His hair was flattened to his skull in parts, sticking up in others. Everything he did made him think. Everything he did made him want to create. Red creases from the sheets crisscrossed between the moles on his shoulder blades. She could feel his excitement, the heat of it. A furnace roaring to life. He was always coming up with new concepts, brilliant concepts. More now, it seemed, and she liked to think that she was his muse.

  She took a drag and gave it back to him, rolling onto her stomach. She knew whatever it was would take him away, for a time. But that was who he was. And he was hers.

  “What time do you think it is?” she asked, faking a yawn.

  “Eight-thirty. The announcer just said it. Vingt heures et demie.”

  “Oh. I wasn’t listening.” She was. Her French sucked. “We should eat something.”

  Joe stood, dropped the butt into a glass of water and swivelled his hips so his penis circled around and around. He kissed her before going to the bathroom to pee.

  “It’s that ‘until death do us part’ line,” he said over the tinkle of his urine in the toilet bowl. “I’ve been thinking about what that means. Like, imagine if when one of us died, the other one—”

  The rest of his sentence got lost in the flush, the blast of water in the sink. He gasped as he splashed his face.

  She watched him sashay to the window and throw open the curtains to the Paris night, naked, his body stretched out like a star. Hoots and whistles up from the street, a woman shouting a cascade of incomprehensible words.

  “I don’t want to think about you dying,” Maureen said.

  He turned his face to her with his arms and legs still splayed, framed by the window. His expression draining of performance, his eyes quieting. He looked back out onto the street and over the rooftops.

  “It’s not about that.” His voice almost tender. “It’s about permanence. Love. What endures, what doesn’t. What’s left in the end.”

  He yanked the curtains closed and used his teeth to pull the cork out of the bottle of Bordeaux. “Anyway, it’s just the start.” He poured mouthfuls into each of their glasses. “Seeds. Nothing yet in the ground.” He placed the bottle back on his nightstand, lit another cigarette and lay down beside her. “Decades to go before I sleep.”

  Miles, she thought. Miles to go.

  She watched the smoke rise to the cracked ceiling, her hand searching for his in the wrinkled sheets. Such beauty in a crack, the patternless zigzagging of it, this scar of decay. The possibility that the floor above could give way and fall through, plaster and wood and frayed wires collapsing onto them mid-fuck.

  She started to have ideas. Things falling apart often gave her ideas. He rolled on top of her, pressing her body into the soft mattress, blocking her view of the crack.

  “Doesn’t inspiration make you horny?” he asked. He took one last drag and dropped his cigarette into her wineglass.

  —

  Lilah Davis-McGovern can already picture the lineups. How the people will spill out onto the sidewalk and down the street, blocking doorways and winding around the corner where there’s a bar with a patio. People idly shifting their weight, looking at their phones, making plans for later. She expects it’ll still be warm enough to sit outside by then and she can see some girl there on the patio with her hair in a topknot, sipping on a pint of craft beer, lighting a menthol and leaning toward a guy in the lineup, saying, “Hey, what’s going on?” Her face crooked with a smirk as she gestures with her cigarette toward the rest of the people waiting, the ones she can see on this part of the block. “New Star Wars movie out or something?”

  The lineup guy will jab an index finger at his thick-fra
med glasses and look at her like she’s from another fucking planet. He’ll stare just long enough to establish his cultural superiority and say, “There’s a dead body in the gallery around the corner. It’s an installation.”

  The patio girl’s eyes will open wide and spit will come out with her exhaled smoke.

  “For real? You’ve got to be shitting me. Like, dead dead? That is seriously fucked up.”

  He’ll nod and raise his eyebrows and return to reading old emails on his phone and she’ll take another drag looking up and down the lineup at the asymmetrical haircuts and worn Converse and say, “So dead people are art now, huh?”

  And he’ll take a breath and almost launch into what he read about the piece in the reviews, how this signals the revival of Maureen Davis’s long-dormant career and ignites pyrotechnics at the end of Joe McGovern’s, but before he does he’ll become aware of the people ahead of him who are listening now and who look like the types who actually know a thing or two about art, so he’ll just say, “Yeah. I guess they are,” in a voice he hopes sounds dismissive, bored and authoritative. He’ll jab at his glasses again and squint at his phone but not without first glancing at the couple ahead to see the man smile at the woman because that was the right kind of answer to give to the kind of girl who doesn’t know a thing about fucking art, and he’ll feel good about himself as he takes a few steps forward along with the line.

  “Lilah? Hon?” Joe gently prods her shin with his metal cane. “You coming?”

  She looks around the oncology waiting room and sees Catherine, the nurse, standing by reception hugging files to her chest, her caked-on mascara framing blue LED eyes.

  “Dr. Kadri’s ready for you, Joe,” Catherine says.

  Lilah gets up and takes her father’s arm. They shuffle their way behind Catherine, who’s slowed her pace to match theirs, making it seem normal, as if she always walks that way.

  —

  Bernie steps away from Maureen to look out the window at the alleyway. “You’re sure about this.”

  His office white, the floors dark maple and rubbed with beeswax. She swivels back and forth in the white moulded chair, plays with a postcard for the gallery’s next show. Vivi: all my yesterdays. Vivi looks about twenty-one. How many yesterdays could she have? Maureen folds the corners down and sets it on the desk like a tiny table, then upends it like a helpless bug.

  “Yes, we both are,” she says. “It’s been years, Bern.”

  He walks over to the slate counter to pour them more coffee.

  She scrapes at nothing with her fingernail on his polished desktop.

  He hands her back her mug thinking of her last show, a decade ago now, the tepid reviews, the remaining pieces now bubble-wrapped and boxed up on high shelves in the storage room beneath them.

  “I’m sorry, Maureen. That you’re going through this. I don’t think I’d know how to be.”

  “That’s just it,” she says, putting her mug down on the bent postcard. “That’s the point. It’s about what happens in the aftermath. It’ll put you right there. Beyond the grief, beyond the transition. You know, to what’s left.”

  She’s different. There’s a spark about her, a lightness, a youth, despite the dark circles and red eyes. A hint of the old Maureen, just out of art school. She arranges her scarf like a sculpture around her neck. Her hands know how to move again. Sure of themselves, minds of their own. Artist’s hands.

  He flips through the sketches and plans in her portfolio. “What if you change your mind?”

  “There are three versions,” she says, pointing at the drawings in front of him. “Right now we’re leaning toward the one without the Plexiglas. The one where we’re in a kind of dance. But I’m still working things out with the Body Worlds guy. He’s got to let me have more control of Joe’s facial expression. If it doesn’t happen, we can live with the encased version. That one,” she says, nodding at the sketch of a man in a transparent box. “With Joe’s hands on the glass? I just don’t want people thinking ‘Damien Hirst’ when they see it. Him, I mean. I don’t want them thinking ‘Oh yeah, the dead shark thing’ and that’s it.” She rummages through her purse for her lip balm and smoothes it over her lips. Eucalyptus sharpens the air. “It can’t just be the next iteration. It’s got to blow out the fucking ceiling or there’s no point.”

  She glances at her phone. Six missed calls.

  “I agree,” Bernie says, eyeing the drawing of Joe in a tank. He’s thinking Hirst. He’s thinking dead shark. “When do you hear back from Body Worlds? Anything I can do to get that—”

  “I have to go,” she says, tapping in her password. “I’ll call you tonight.” She grabs her jacket and purse and listens to her voicemail as she heads for the door.

  “Maureen, I just think it would be more effective if—” He stops when he sees her slumped at the window. “Jesus,” he says, going to her.

  —

  “Can I tweet this, Dad?”

  “No.”

  “Come on. It’s a fucking miracle.”

  “Language. Did you talk to your mom?”

  “Tried her like ten times.”

  With Bernie, he knows. Her phone on silent in her purse; the plans, sketches, notes all laid out on the table in the gallery, ringed with coffee stains. They’re probably making a list of who to invite. Editors, curators, major collectors. Firming up the artist’s statement, deciding how to marry the funeral to the opening for maximum impact.

  “Pass me your phone.”

  “Wait.”

  “If you tweet this you’re grounded for a month.”

  “Easy there, Lazarus.”

  He goes to snatch it from her just as it rings, surprised at his own reawakened agility. Lilah ducks out of reach and answers.

  “Mom! Can you believe this? We can’t believe it!” She grins at her dad, eyes alight. “I’m totally shaking.” Her words start firing like bullets from a semi-automatic. “It’s like some kind of freaking miracle of modern medicine. You should have seen Dr. Kadri’s face! He looked like he was in a fucking wind tunnel. Like he obviously didn’t think Dad had a chance in hell. All that shit they said about the drug trial? They totally thought it would fail.”

  She looks up, passes him the phone. “Laz! Hey, Laz—I think Mom’s in shock!”

  Joe—

  Maureen—

  You must be—

  I know. I know!

  I can’t believe…

  Me neither.

  Wow. I mean, just…wow. How do you feel?

  I don’t know. Alive? Alive! [Laughs.]

  Alive, yeah. For sure. Alive. This is, wow, this is really something.

  They’ll keep testing but yeah. He says there’s nothing. It’s gone.

  But they’re still testing.

  They just can’t believe it, I guess. But scan after scan, nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nada.

  Gone.

  Yeah.

  You okay?

  Oh my God yeah! So much more than okay!

  Yeah, I know, eh? I’m still just [he exhales, long and wavering] just totally blown away. Blown away.

  Maureen takes a cab to get home before they do and goes to her studio in the garage out back. She lights the roach she’d left in the ashtray, takes a few pulls there in the quiet beside the vase of wilting tulips, the cans of paintbrushes and boxes of charcoal, the splattered, splintering easels collapsed and leaning against the wall. Her hands are shaking. She looks at the drawings of dead Joe taped above her work table. The progression of the piece from its conception, the earliest ideas sketched in Joe’s own renowned hand, to where she’s got it now, nearly complete. She tears them down. They drift to the concrete like fallen leaves. Detritus.

  Soon the car will pull up in the laneway and park parallel to the garage door. She will hear Lilah’s rat-a-tat voice dip and crescendo with excitement like the little bird from Peter and the Wolf. They will expect to find her inside making a celebratory dinner. They will e
xpect to see her face lit with relief. They will expect to have a cathartic family embrace wherein the pressure of the past few years will burst like a cyst and all the viscous grief and pain and fear will come oozing out.

  She takes another pull off the roach, the heater searing her fingers.

  The cyst breaks and something small and hard and sharp rolls out and clinks to the floor like a pebble, bouncing once on its way to the drain. The car pulls up. She’s glad she’ll have tears to show.

  “I thought we’d just order pizza tonight,” she calls out when she hears them on the other side. She presses the button and the garage door opens slowly, like it doesn’t want to reveal too much too fast.

  His old black Vans.

  His shins like spindles in his jeans.

  His faded denim shirt, loose, with sleeves rolled up. The crow tattoo on his forearm a smudge of black on loose skin.

  His face grey, his eyes big and round and yellow and expectant.

  She is holding the joint, adrift in a sea of dead Joes.

  “Pizza sounds good,” he says.

  “Thank Christ.” Lilah goes to help her father. “Does this mean we’re done with that macrobiotic shit?” She closes his car door and places his hand on her shoulder for support.

  “Amen,” he says, leaning on her, and together they pass Maureen, scuffing and creasing the sketches underfoot as they make their way to the yard and into the house. The lights flick on.

  —

  Later that night, after Joe has vomited up most of his mushroom pizza and Maureen has helped him back to bed, she returns to the bathroom to sop up the mess with an old towel.

  “I’m sorry,” he says from the dark.

  “Don’t be. Not like I haven’t done this before!”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Pizza was probably a bad idea. We should be easing you back into that kind of thing.”

  Asleep, she figures, when still she hears nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. Quieter now.

  She uses the towel to scoop up the vomit and tosses it in the tub. While the water blasts from the faucet, chunks shooting up and smacking against the subway tiles, she wipes the remaining spatters from the floor with a facecloth, on her hands and knees, sobbing.