The Dead Husband Project Read online

  —

  In the morning, sunlight through the blinds paints white bars on the walls and ceiling of their bedroom. He sleeps. Each of his breaths no longer a countdown; each of his breaths sucking air from the room. Maureen slips out of bed without disturbing the sheets, unhooks her robe from the back of the door and finds Lilah in the kitchen, at the stove, head bobbing to music from headphones. She’s making pancakes, singing tunelessly as she pours more batter into the pan, the stack beside her already way more than the three of them can eat.

  It’s not uncommon, Maureen wants to say. It’s not uncommon for there to be a surge of hope right near the end. A final little hill in the roller coaster before we speed down into the last dark tunnel. Something she can add to her artist’s statement. Yes, it makes sense, the more she thinks of it, that a vortex of emotion and attention and possibility would whip up around Joe at the end, ensuring maximum devastation upon his inevitable demise.

  “Hello? Earth to Mom. I said, do you think Dad would like blueberries or chocolate chips in his?”

  “Li, honey, I’m not sure if—”

  “Tough call,” Joe says, limping past with his cane. “Feels like a chocolate-chippity kind of day, don’tcha think?”

  “Dad! I was going to surprise you!” Batter drips from her spatula as Lilah blocks her father from the stack. “This was supposed to be breakfast in bed.”

  “Careful—” Maureen lunges for the roll of paper towels to wipe up what spilled. “Careful. There are eggs in there. Bacteria.” She throws the mess into the organics bin and washes her hands. Joe sprinkles more chocolate chips into the sizzling batter, licks his fingers.

  “Dad!”

  “I’m going to get the paper,” Maureen announces, but Joe has Lilah in a fit of giggles. They don’t turn when she goes.

  Spring leaves shimmer in the breeze. Tinny reggae from an old Boombox on a porch down the way. A streetcar chimes the next block over and starlings chirp their panic from the top of every tree that lines the street. Maureen flops down on one of the weathered chairs and sifts through the paper to find the arts section, letting the rest of it slide down in a messy pile at her feet. A photo takes up nearly the whole first page. Vivi. Bernie’s new artist.

  A pull quote: I went through a radical shift, like I was re-born. Everything was brand new. Everything.

  Vivi’s hair is in a messy bun on top of her head, her jeans shredded and spattered with paint. She’s smoking. She looks tired. She looks glorious. She’s sitting on the floor in her studio, the long factory windowsill behind her lined with smooth stones and wildflowers.

  The headline: “Youth Movement.”

  “Good morning!”

  Maureen looks up. It’s Rui, their grandfatherly Portuguese neighbour walking his terrier. She’s now aware of her threadbare robe, her bare legs, her hair matted and greasy.

  “Joe’s going to live,” she blurts out, as if to explain her state. “We found out yesterday.”

  “Oh how wonderful,” he says, stopping. He looks genuinely relieved in the way that good, warm-hearted people can for someone they barely know. “That is just wonderful news.”

  “Some kind of freaking miracle of modern medicine!” Maureen yells, laughing. She cocks her head toward the door as if she’s heard something. “Oh! Lilah’s calling. We’re having pancakes. It’s a celebration. A pancake celebration!” She gets to her feet and begins to gather the paper together, the belt of her robe loosening.

  “Well, God answered all our prayers,” he says as the dog chews on some weeds. “Truly, truly wonderful news. I’m so happy for you all.”

  The breeze picks up, blowing sections of the paper around the porch and Maureen’s robe wide open, her nightshirt beneath barely reaching the top of her thighs.

  “Oh!” She tries to cover herself with one hand, grasping for the pages with the other. She sees Rui see the unshaved tuft between her legs. He presses his eyes shut and turns his head toward the street.

  “Oops! Damn paper!” she says, forcing a chuckle and clutching at the flaps of her billowing robe as she scrambles, hunched over, around the porch. Finally able to wrap it around her, she knots the frayed belt tight enough to crush her abdominal organs, and snatches up the pages in a crumpled heap.

  Rui yanks the leash to get his dog out of Maureen’s garden and quickly starts on his way again.

  “Well,” he says, not looking back. “Well, please give my best to Joe.”

  She closes her eyes, cringing as she makes her way back through the house to the kitchen where she dumps the crinkled hill of weekend paper on the table.

  “What the hell happened?” Lilah asks, clanking her syrup-streaked plate in the sink.

  “Oh. Wind. It’s windy.”

  Lilah begins to shuffle through the shifting wad. “Dad wants the arts section.”

  “Well, it’s somewhere in there.” Maureen tugs the belt tighter around her waist, making breathing near impossible, and takes a pancake off the remaining stack by the stove. “I’m going to go get some work done.”

  Lilah stops. Looks at her. “Are you for real?”

  “Just for an hour or so. I need to finish up a couple of things.”

  Her daughter blinks. “You’re joking, right?”

  “No, I’m not joking, Lilah. I’ve got some things—”

  “Newsflash: Dad’s not dying.”

  “Lilah…” She thinks of what to say, but can only come up with: “That’s enough.”

  Lilah shakes her head, returning to the paper. “I mean,” she says under her breath, “the only thing that’s dead is your stupid fucking installation.”

  “Lilah! I’ve had enough of your mouth.”

  Her daughter finds the arts section, flicks it in the air in front of her to iron out the creases, and glares at her mother on her way out of the room.

  —

  Her studio doesn’t feel like a studio. It feels like a garage. She can almost smell the gasoline and cleaning solvents in the shadows and dusty light. Can almost see the metal shelves stacked with tools, old bicycles leaning against the wall, an oil stain on the ground beneath the fallen dead Joes. She gathers up the sketches for the recycling bin but stops herself. She lays them on the work table.

  Maybe not now, she thinks, fingering the drawings of Joe in a box, Joe on a chair, Joe lying curled up on the ground, naked and fetal. Maybe not right now, maybe just a few more years. But it is cold comfort.

  Her phone vibrates in the pocket of her robe.

  Bernie.

  He must have heard the news about his top-selling artist.

  She had been on the verge. She’d felt it crowning. She could already see the front page of the arts section, the cover of Artforum. She’d practised her expression: the flatline of a mouth, the volcanic eyes, the grief that was to be roiling under the surface. It was her turn.

  “Stop,” she says out loud, tears in her eyes. “Stop, you stupid, stupid child.”

  She should feel like a monster for thinking it. But fuck it if it wasn’t true.

  She lights a cigarette and opens the garage door, exhaling into the face of a girl passing by. “Oh shit.” Maureen flutters her hand in the air to clear the smoke. “Christ. I’m so sorry.”

  The girl smiles, gives the peace sign. She’s wearing oversized headphones and dark ’80s Ray-Bans, her black hair roped in a braid down her back. Maureen watches her go, her mind morphing the girl into someone she couldn’t possibly be.

  Claudette.

  Claudette at Joe’s show some twenty years ago. Black hair, sunglasses, oracular smile. Stepping out of the gallery and onto the sidewalk where Maureen had escaped to get some air.

  “You’re Maureen Davis, aren’t you?”

  “I am, yeah. Joe’s wife.”

  “I’d heard that,” she said, putting her shades on her head. “Must be cool to live with another artist. I was going to say that I really loved your Woman Burning series. I was a couple of years behind you at OCA. Big fan. What a
re you working on now?”

  “Oh. Well,” Maureen started. She was rattled by the recognition. She wasn’t working on anything. They’d been travelling; Joe’s work stirring interest in New York, London, Düsseldorf. Paris. She’d wandered European streets while he met with dealers and curators and gallerists, drinking on her own in sidewalk cafés, studying the way people moved and talked in these foreign cities. Archiving it, she’d tell herself, for her own future work. “I’m at the embryonic stage with a couple of projects.”

  “I hear ya, I hear ya. Totally. I’m the same.”

  They stood watching the cabs and streetcars inch their way along, the city’s edges softened by the setting sun. “Hey,” Claudette said, leaning in. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you okay? You seem kind of sad.”

  Maureen felt something quake. “Oh, really? That’s funny. I’m not. No. Not at all.”

  “Sorry.” Claudette sidestepped closer, their arms now touching. “I’ve been drinking since noon. My radar’s probably off.”

  She took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Maureen. They watched the traffic in silence, Claudette squinting each time she took a drag, lines appearing by her eyes that made her look older than she was. Her loose tank top fluttered in the warm breeze, hair escaping her braid in blowing wisps.

  When she’d had enough, she flicked the butt into the street, orange sparks against the grey. She took Maureen’s out of her mouth and flicked it too.

  “Shall we?” She smiled, closer still.

  Maureen followed her back into the gallery, past Joe who was listening to a major collector and his smiling, nodding wife (“Brilliant. Scathingly brilliant. They’ll call you a misogynist but they just can’t see what you’re really trying to do here”), past the tight pack of young art groupies with their wine in plastic cups and their giddy glances at Joe, past the larger-than-life installation of a woman being quartered by rabid wolves, down the narrow creaking stairway to the bathroom door. There wasn’t much space for two at the base of the steps and when Claudette turned to touch her they were face to face. Maureen closed her eyes, surrendering to the tectonic shifts, to the shockwaves radiating from her core.

  “Hey!”

  It was Joe at the top of the stairs, glaring down at where they were pressed together.

  “Hey! Get up here.”

  “Nothing happened,” Maureen said in the back seat of the cab while he smoked out the window on the way home. She liked the way that sounded, like something could have. Like something did. She said it again. “Nothing happened.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. After a few minutes he tossed out his cigarette and wiped his face with his hand, pulling at his eye sockets. “It’s just that, I don’t know, you can be so humiliating.”

  It was years before Maureen saw her again. Not until a talk at the AGO when one of Claudette’s lauded light and audio installations was there after showing at the Venice Biennale. By then Claudette had relocated to Berlin and had pieces in the permanent collections of the Tate and MoMA, pieces, the reviewers effused, that had the power to break your heart. People would line up for hours in the rain, in the cold, in the stifling heat outside a gallery, waiting for their turn to step into her pulsing creation, put on the headset and fall to bits. Videos were made of them, arms outstretched, reaching for something that wasn’t there, tears rolling down from under the boxy visualization goggles. They’d walk out, dabbing their eyes, murmuring to one another about her genius.

  Lilah was three months old when the show came to Toronto. Maureen, deadened by sleep deprivation, strapped her in a baby carrier and waited in line all morning outside the gallery. But when she was next to go in, she turned away. She told the startled woman behind her that it was because she’d had her heart broken enough times and didn’t have the energy to take it once more. They’d laughed together at the supposed truth of this. The woman cooed at Lilah.

  Maureen wandered the other galleries, her mind soupy as she gently bounced along, hoping to get Lilah to fall asleep before Claudette’s talk began. When the baby finally drifted off in front of an A. Y. Jackson, Maureen considered slumping into a chair to nod off herself, but instead bobbed her way to the auditorium and slipped into the shadows at the back where she could stand, rocking from side to side, without disturbing anyone.

  Claudette sat cross-legged on a stool on the stage, a fringed scarf wrapped twice around her long neck, and took questions from the audience at the end. A young woman went up to the mic to long-windedly explain how her master’s thesis pivoted on the heart-breaker piece at the Tate Modern, and specifically how it may or may not have been responsible for the otherwise inexplicable waves of (a) divorces and (b) dead birds that fell from the sky in the wake of its installation. Claudette smiled, awaiting her question. The young woman cleared her throat and asked, “What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given, as an artist?”

  Claudette tittered, thought about it a moment.

  “Let other people have babies,” she said.

  The audience erupted in laughter.

  “Let other people get married!” she called out, taking a swig of bottled water as a second wave of hilarity rose up.

  As if on cue, Lilah started to cry.

  Shh, shh, shh, Maureen bobbed.

  People in the back row turned, their faces lit with laughter, their attention now on Maureen and her strapped-on wailer as though they were part of the show. Row after row, others turned to look, their mirth reigniting. Claudette shielded her eyes against the spotlights, trying to see what was happening.

  “There’s a baby, a baby crying…” voices explained.

  “Oh.” Claudette nodded, took another swig. “I’m sure he’s adorable.”

  Maureen curtsied good-naturedly at the ensuing eruption (the loudest yet), trotted out of the shadows and out the auditorium door. The squirming, red-faced, infuriated mass of a child began to catch her breath with the rhythm of her mother’s fast-paced walk, and was asleep again by the time they reached the subway. Static crackled at the end of Maureen’s nerves. Her breath shallow and quick. But at least she could stop bouncing; the subway provided enough movement and sound for them both as it clanked and shifted and rumbled its way under the streets.

  She kissed the top of Lilah’s warm head. She breathed her in. She closed her eyes for a brief standing nap. She decided to get off two stops early to pick up salmon and potatoes and olive oil and green beans for dinner. They could walk the rest of the way.

  —

  “Mom! Are you out there?”

  Maureen tosses her cigarette into the laneway.

  It’s Joe, she thinks, her heart racing. He’s collapsed. The pancakes, the chocolate chips, the pizza—it was all too much for his vulnerable system. The excitement, the good news. It pushed him over the final lip of life. This is it, she thinks as she darts back through the studio toward the house. This is it.

  “I’m coming!” She runs up the crooked steps to the back door. “Li? Have you called an am—”

  Music, coming from the street. Trombones, trumpets, the pound of a bass drum. It sounds like a marching band closing in. Lilah and Joe are on the front porch, leaning on one another, laughing. Joe is waving his cane out at the road.

  “Mom! You have to see this!” Lilah reaches back for her mother’s hand and pulls Maureen beside her.

  Dozens of black helium balloons float above the heads of people she hasn’t seen in years. White streamers trail from slow-moving stilt-walkers. A tattoo-covered man leaps ahead of the band and swallows an arrowhead of fire. A woman in a beard lugs a styrofoam cross as others fan her with palms. Someone’s pulling a wagon and ringing a large bell, the passenger yelling in an exaggerated British accent, “I’m not dead yet!” And leading the way, in full zombie drag, are Don and Phil from Joe’s former art collective.

  The band reaches the front lawn and marches on the spot, still playing the tune (“Alive” by Pearl Jam, it dawns on Maureen
) as the paraders let go of their balloons, launching a black plume of shifting constellations that get smaller and smaller and disappear much faster than anyone expects. Artists and writers and old friends line up to hug and kiss Joe on their way into the house, and within minutes the main floor is transformed. A DJ sets up his turntables on the dining room table, and big coolers of ice jammed with beer and cheap champagne are dumped on the kitchen floor.

  “Did anyone bring OJ for mimosas?” someone calls out. “Or is it noon yet?”

  A few remaining black balloons drift up to the high ceiling. An antique throne is carried into the living room and Joe is lifted onto it, a cold beer pressed into his hand. One after another, the paraders crouch at his knee and talk to him in earnest tones, laughing as they wipe tears from their faces. The band members take off their red-tasselled hats and jackets and strew themselves lazily across the lawn and the porch, the trumpet player leaning against the front door as he chats up Lilah, gesturing self-consciously with the beer bottle in his hand.

  Maureen is still in her robe. She is cornered by Phil, who towers over her in his size 13 stilettos, his eyelids caked in sparkling green below a platinum Dolly Parton wig. The rest of his face is expertly contoured with grey and black makeup. He looks like he’s been dead for days, but Maureen knows he’s just come back from directing a Justin Timberlake video.

  “You don’t mind us sharing in the excitement, do you, hon? We had this all ready to go for Joe’s funeral.” He takes a long pull off his empty cigarette holder and blows pretend smoke in her face. His breath smells like stale mornings. “So much better this way, isn’t it?” He smiles and turns on his heel, teeters delicately into the living room. He was one of the few people who knew what they had planned for Joe’s body. He hated the idea. He called it gauche and told Joe that Maureen wasn’t Marina Abramović. She could never pull it off.

  She goes into the kitchen where the lights are now out and the window is covered with a blanket so people can dance in the dark with glow sticks. She saw Joe on his throne with a pink one encircling his thin neck. He looked like a target in a carnival game. Ten points! The dancers spill into the dining room and push the table-turned-DJ-booth to the wall on its squeaking casters. Down the hall, neighbours appear at the front door inquisitively; the revellers in the hallway encourage them inside. Maureen waves away plastic glass after plastic glass of champagne, pours herself coffee, and ducks around an ecstatic dancer to get milk from the fridge. Through the doorway she sees her neighbour Rui with his arm on the mantel, nodding to the music. Their eyes meet. He winks. She shudders.