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| Jean Gagnon. |
Chapter Twenty
When Jean arrived…
When Jean arrived, he was interested to see that Janet was barefoot, and clad in a creamy, softly-clinging peasant dress, with short lacy sleeves worn off the shoulder. The floral print was cheerful and colorful without being visually jarring, or overbearing. Its thin, sheer fabric accentuated her curves in a casual, informal manner calculated to draw the eye and the imagination. The lacy bits around the hem, bodice and sleeves unobtrusively drew attention to the gently-rounded warm skin located immediately nearby.
Her shoulders were smooth and healthy-looking, not scrawny or bony. Her skin wasn’t stretched too tightly over her frame. As she took his coat, he ascertained that she came up to about his chin. Her fragrance was close and enticing as she took the package from him. Jean had brought a red wine and a white wine, just in case. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, not dry-looking, with no freckles or age-spots. Its sheen had a tawny note, like a sun-kissed tigress, asleep in the long grass. Her blue eyes shyly met his. When they did, the clarity of those depths was stunning, surrounded and set off by long, thick, curving lashes that deepened the mystery of these windows into her soul.
Jean’s heart was going a mile a minute. It was hard to speak, but something unexpected came out. The humility of her little house, bright and cheerful in its decorations, it struck him that he was some kind of an idiot to come here, to hope, to dream, perhaps just to fantasize. All hopes of mere friendship went out the window when he saw how beautiful she really was. Up until now, she had been hiding herself. Or maybe he’d just been lying to himself.
“You look lovely.”
Her eyes dropped to the ground for a moment where bare toes mocked her from the area rug below.
What an obviously erotic message.
“It’s just that I’m so used to seeing you in your truck, or in a parka.”
She chuckled a bit at that. Inwardly, she was softly cursing Molly, who had left not a half hour before. She had the impression Jean was downright intimidated. Janet was wondering if they had maybe gone a little overboard, but Molly’s persuasion and deft hand with a cosmetics case had a logic and a fateful allure all their own. She was conscious of the light yet musky scent more than anything else.
Molly had spritzed on judicious gobs of it, when she stepped warm from the shower.
“Oh, you have a fireplace.” Jean followed her into the living room. “That’s cool.”
He walked in and took a look around, nodding in approval at its hominess.
“Yes, we have wood but I haven’t had time to lay it.”
Janet disappeared into the kitchen for a moment to put the wine in the fridge, although it wouldn’t get very cold in the ten or so minutes remaining before dinner.
“I just have to make the gravy.” She called, but he was right there, interrupting her wool-gathering.
No time to back out.
“If you have some old newspapers, I could get the fire ready.” He was still shy but with warm eyes glinting. “I brought a corkscrew, in case you didn’t have one.”
Their fingertips brushed past all too quickly when he handed it over.
“Oh. Well, you think of everything.”
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| A man, right there in her kitchen. |
Here was a man, right in her kitchen.
He seemed awfully absorbed in looking at everything that wasn’t her. He abruptly turned and went to get the fire ready while she stirred the gravy. The sound of tearing newspapers came from the living room. Molly had made her spray tan-stuff all over, and then quickly jump in the shower. Molly had trimmed her hair, Molly had insisted on the peasant dress, the earrings, the scent, the bare feet, the ankle bracelets. Moll had done hours of work with the curling iron, makeup, pad and brush.
“Don’t let him get away.” She said. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
Molly had said that.
Molly was going to pay for this someday. The ghost of Don hovered at her shoulder.
She wondered what such a ghost might say, if it could speak to her. How would Don feel about this? Seeing his widowed wife attempting to attract—no, seduce another man? She was all tensed up about it, and then suddenly her shoulders slumped in a kind of self-acceptance. Don wasn’t here. He couldn’t make the decision for her, he could offer no opinion. His spirit was right there in the room with her—and with Jean, for that matter.
Somehow she knew that it would be all right, that Don would understand, and be happy for her. Her beloved had been dead for four years, and there were times when she got so angry with him for being dead—for leaving the whole thing up to her. Once or twice, in the depths of self-loathing, she wondered if the accident was Don’s way of suicide, an easy way out of the responsibility of being a family man and breadwinner. If she wasn’t careful she was going to burn the gravy. It was all up to her now. Don was the assertive one, and she didn’t have a clue of how to go about this. Maybe Don just had too much on his mind, and he got careless. She had occasionally wondered about that.
When she beckoned Jean to the table, she was struck by how scared the poor fellow looked, as if he thought she had plans for him, like it was kind of a test, one with all kinds of trick questions. Stand-up comics on television had all sorts of odd perspectives on so-called dating.
“No one really dates anymore.” Where in the hell did that come from—
“Pardonnez moi?” The involuntary response was in the tongue of his youth.
Her stomach quivered as if butterflies were walking around inside of it. He stared deep into her own eyes, possibly a little trepidation visible there as well. If he knows how to look, surely he could see that Janet was just as scared as he was?
“I feel so much like a shy teenager.” A hesitant grin broke forth of its own accord. “Nowadays people seem to shack up instantly, or announce their engagement pretty quickly.”
“I see these huge wedding announcements in the paper all the time.” She said this after some thought.
“Perhaps their circumstances are different.” It was a good enough answer.
It was nice to talk to an adult once in a while, someone with perhaps shared or similar experiences, yet maybe just once, somebody with a different perspective. Her few girlfriends were either married, or divorced, more or less happily either way.
They sat down to the food, and much to her relief, he began digging in without shyness. He seemed good and hungry. That was the key, according to Molly.
“What do you mean?”
She wasn’t gushing, this was genuinely intriguing. The real problem with first dates is of course, what the hell do you talk about?
“Well, in my own case, I don’t know where I’ll be in a year.” That seemed genuine. “That kind of plunging into commitment, well, it would really hinge on how I figured to make a living, and all that sort of thing.”
“And so you’re saying…” She prompted.
“If maybe they had good jobs, and had some kind of good future together, maybe the question is, why waste time?” He grinned. “How else can I say it?”
She was relieved to see him loosen up a bit. While a little coaxing and coaching by Molly seemed to have done her good, she wasn’t quite sure what would help Jean.
“Well, it’s just leftovers, but the wine is nice.”
“Yes, it’s been a long time since I had a real, home-cooked turkey dinner.” His eyes went far away for a moment. “Their circumstances may be different.”
Janet felt kind of sorry for Jean, realizing that Molly, for one, had been intent on setting a rather obvious trap for the guy. It gave her new courage.
“That’s okay, Jean. We have pie and ice cream for desert. Then you could help me with the dishes, and then we can light the fire. I’ve got some CD’s that Jason has been bugging me to listen to.”
“That will be wonderful.”
Poor Jean was blushing beet red and Janet had to repress a giggle, carefully. All of her confidence was coming back. Janet felt a moment of humble gratitude that Jean was genuinely a nice guy, kind of shy, but clean and polite.
His embarrassment was real, and rather charming, the sort of romance that she had read about in books. She was an adult, a single woman. But all of her past experiences were in her teen years, or as a married woman, all of it with Don. The truly, incredible, amazing thing was that she had found the nerve to do it, and now she was wondering what it would be like to be held by Jean, for real. She sensed a kind of gentleness about Jean, but also hidden inner strengths not easily displayed like badges on a hat.
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| Janet's little house at least has a fireplace. |
“If I had to write a singles ad about myself, it would be something like, man with no future seeks woman with no past.” While Janet laughed outright, he seemed a little uncomfortable with the honesty of this revelation.
Jean plunged into a brief, very brief précis of his life over the last few years, the wrongful conviction, the jail term, the inheritance from his ancient relative, and he just seemed really despondent about it all. Jean also seemed very sincere in his curious questions of Janet, yet he had a way of asking them that made the answers self-evident, or at least easy to respond to. She thought she was doing okay so far. Jean seemed much more relaxed, and she felt in control of her own situation. She came to terms with the fact that Jean was a very intelligent man, with a sensitivity to her needs and feelings. How she knew it was pure instinct.
Where was she finding all this courage? She wondered, and listened, and talked. Jean, with those dark eyes, had a way of looking into her, not just at her. It was almost spooky, in the way that their thoughts met, and matched, and yet with so much as yet unspoken.
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| He's back. |
***
Unbeknownst to Jean and Janet, a big white bird sat on a low-hanging bough of a red cedar in Janet Herbert’s small back yard. Its patient form perched there, with tall, tufted ears open to all that lay around it. Just around the corner, back thirty metres or as far as they could get from the pool of light under a streetlamp, sat Jeff McCabe and Ted Hiltz in a Ford pickup with crew cab and huge all-terrain tires. The motor ticked from time to time as it cooled in the evening silence and a clammy dew on the glass obstructed the windows.
It was a relatively new subdivision, with development stalled due to the economic downturn, so many homes had partially-treed vacant lots beside them. The angled and curving streets offered a number of vantage points through the thin screen of brush and scattered earthen heaps. The house that Gagnon was in was a relic of an earlier time. With nothing much to do to while away the hours, they found themselves endlessly speculating as to what was going on in there, until in a state of mutually embarrassing, overly-specific visualization, each man was left with his own thoughts and his own silence, to bleakly contemplate and comprehend their own personal fates.
It looked like being a long night, and with all that coffee, sleeping tomorrow might be a problem.
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| Jeff: I wonder what they're doing in there. |
END
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| Ted: I know what I'd be doing. |
Images. Louis.
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