Free Juliet Was a Surprise by Gaston Bill Page B

an image so self-knowing it made her forgive everything. He was being ironic, of course.
    But he was funny, not just morose, morbid, mordant . Once, soon after their new passions had cooled and la différence had relaxed, when he touched her elbow next to the bed and she told him she was so tired it would be like being with a dead fish, he paused as if considering, and asked, “Dead how long?”
    She needs to understand exactly one thing about him. His jokes—if you could use that word—often appeared to surprise him too. They seemed to take him places, the way one mightfollow a sudden dark alley. All the while saying, Look at me . This was important too. She almost does not like to think of this. Not a month into their marriage, her cheek pressed to his shoulder, she watched him shaving and said something like, “ Mon dieu , to have to shave your face .” At this, he stared harder into the mirror, growing clownishly bug-eyed as if discovering the gravitas of her comment even while scraping through foam. He proceeded to draw his razor in front of his ear, shaving off his entire sideburn as he did, and then still farther up, slow and hard so she could hear the cut bristles, dragging a new path, destroying his haircut and in the end having to shave his entire head. He does not act like a lawyer, she thought at the time; he violates laws of common sense. She wondered about his colleagues, these repressed arbiters of civilization, and came to see that lawyers often acted le roi du flan but were in fact frustrated about something deeply general. Many drank heavily as a controlled hobby. But Bill did not drink like that. He was neither repressed nor civilized. He was certainly not drunk when he died. He did not just fall down drunk.
    She noticed his jealousy of clients. Bill would use the word “artist” facetiously, especially around young musicians. He was easiest to read here, his mockery so plain. Female singers sang “emo-porn,” he said, and tough-voiced guys had their balls in their throat. No, hairy balls in their throat. The good-looking clients were “faces.” (And might not that be me? she wanted to say.) By the time clients could afford his help they were rich, and in his view overnight spoiled brats. If they deigned to meet with him at all he was seen as “the bearer of mysterious numbers” as well as “a boss they could fire.” Once he did getfired when word got back to a singer (a face) that in a meeting Bill had lifted and shaken a laptop while claiming that it could make him sound as good. He detested certain rappers especially, called them pigs, and he hated “doing their arithmetic.” But he liked the theatre people. Chantal thinks she remembers him saying, “They seem to know they’re crazy as babies.”
    But largely his clientele depressed him. Maybe it was because they were doing something creative while he was not. His colourful clients even seemed to make him regret his own name. Bill Robertson, a bland one.
    What matters is the depression. How it fit, how it might fit, with humour. With joking. It is this that she needs to know.
    CHANTAL PAUSES at the grand mahogany door. The corridor is perfectly silent, so his rhythm is insistent. She thinks she hears Cameron’s laugh. It should relieve her, that his son might be at ease with all of this today, but it does not.
    Chantal wants to ask Cameron something but knows she will not dare, because it will sound only horrible and she will not find the best words: How far would your father go to tell a joke? Another thing she will not ask him, less because it might risk the insurance money than because it might hurt him: Do you think he was suicidal? And, If he did kill himself, he would make it funny, wouldn’t he? She can picture Cameron’s face. He would think she was crazy. He would think her even crazier if she asked, Why did he not love me enough to stay?
    Janet, one