If only my name was Dick instead of Jeff Davis. He would know what to do. Dick, you know, was the kind of storied police detective you read about in the murderous thrillers recorded on the New York Times best seller’s list. Dick was a kind of gumshoe trope who found himself in almost every wannabe’s story line. It was easy for him. He was my brother.

I was planning ‘the’ murder though no one scarcely would believe it. Perhaps, my dear departed brother would believe it—I playfully called him D.D. for short, but he was now dead. I alone knew how the d’s in d-ea-d were connected. You, if you must know, must know that there isn’t a violent bone in my body though you would not know it by looking at my broken arm, bruised face and magnificent matrimonial scars. At first the police had placed me in their crosshairs for Dick’s death, but they soon discovered it was Janea alone who robbed me of soul, wit and liberty. She was accused and sentenced with Dick’s murder.

I met Plain Jane, named Janea Ming, in the second month of my final year at the University of Toronto, taking a fencing class. I was attending Wycliff College, and she attended…well, I didn’t know. I had given the most honest answer I could when the prosecutor asked where she had gone to school.

“Hell, if I know,” I retorted. “I couldn’t begin to guess where she went to college. There was no record of her applications nor admission into any of Canada’s finest institutions of higher learning.” No record, indeed, of any address, family, or ancestry – she was one Janea “Melchizadek” Ming.

It didn’t stop me from marrying her though, at the altar of a simple Lutheran chapel in Niagara Falls. In addition to the Ph. D., I could not refuse the title of plain old “Mister” Davis. The theme of that homily, on that occasion, still resounds in my ears. “Love is a strong as death, all the flames of the evil one cannot quench such a love, nor all the waters in the world drown such a love.” It was as easy as that!

The marriage was witnessed in spades within five months of our first touch. Our first “touch” in fencing that is. A touch is that infamous move, when in fencing, you stab or slash your partner for sport. Janea was a woman who Ernest Hemingway might easily name bright girl. She was witty, drop-dead gorgeous and she produced in me a chemistry that poked, prodded and pulsed at my very being. I was touched and infatuated; and she was touched, that is, insane.

The first months, perhaps even the first year or two of our marriage, were everything you imagined them to be. A hot mess between the sheets that produced a brighter flame conceived in our daughter Dee. She was born exactly nine months, nine days and nine hours after the now infamous “I do’s!” Our vows were witnessed by my brother Dick, my Aunt Liz, and my mother named “Willi” for short. She was the prodigal Wilhelmina Davis, a single Mom who did everything in her power to nurture her twin boys. And she, like me, proposed to raise her brood without a spouse. No Mings were present for the wedding, no dynasty, no self-effacing humble immigrants from Toronto’s Chinatown. There was no cherished hand in marriage, offered after the Bing or Ming blossom tea was presented, in a humble herbal gesture entreating that traditional Chinese family, or patriarch, for Janea’s hand in marriage.

Janea Ming had a dark side not evident at first. I had long surmised that she had entered the country with her medication stashed away to mask and balance her manic depression and violent swings in mood. I was guessing but I had run that scenario through my mind a thousand times, searching and longing for answers. Playful and flirty one moment and short tempered, violent the next. She was controlling, conniving and cunning like the fencing opponent I knew all too well.

I first noticed her giggle, her jarring glance, and pointed wit not to mention her soft proportions, perky physique and sexual allure when she bowed for our first match and threw a surprising kiss at me before her first lunge. She was a tall drink of water, an atypical unicorn without a ponytail or humble expression. After the session, a quick shower and a dash of rose perfume infused with sandalwood, she was prepared to ask me out on a date.

“I won’t bite!” she said affably.

I was dragging through the final weeks before my oral defense, and welcomed the diversion and blurted, “Sure! Great!”

“I’m sorry about that rip in your jacket and your knickers,” she said. “I’m playing Hamlet, you know, and I’m working on the scene with the poisoned sword and coaching Gertrude on her final farewell to drink.” Pausing, she performed the mime. “To drink or not to drink?” she said smiling. “You know, the perfect poison chalice,” she concluded.

She said it with some anger in her voice. I chalked it all up to theatrics at the time. Theatrics were her predictable road to the future.

“What’s your poison?” she queried as we made our way into downtown.

“Timmy’s,” I said.

So, it was off to Tim Hortons, followed by a drink or two at McVeighs on Church Street. I told her how I was seeking a position as a professor of English in Cambridge, England, a philologist by training, and that I had come into some wealth at the passing of my father Mark Davis. Dad was born into one of America’ richest families according to Forbes. In hindsight, I don’t think she cared about my money but saw me simply as a blond but tall, bushy-eyebrowed, blushing guy who kept trying to read the tattoo poking out just above her lacy bra. My probing eyes could not yet read the smaller Mandarin invented by that legendary four-eyed calligrapher. It turns out my brother was right about his affectionate bright girl knick-name for Ming. He discovered, after all, the surname ‘Ming’ especially in the smaller pictograms, meaning clear or bright.

It didn’t take long, and I was compelled to embrace her. This time I breathed in her hair and the fragrance of her international tastes. Chanel N.5 could no longer claim to be the authoritative gatekeeper of refined taste. In fact, Janea could be the storyline of their new cultural motif, complete with street styles, fencing sabre and fashion.

“Let’s go to your –” she invited.

Gordon Lightfoot’s lyrics traced our features as our ‘fingers entwinned like ribbons of light’ as we ‘stood by the doorway’ of my eleventh story apartment on Jarvis. The rest was chemistry. What followed was a quick courtship, engagement and quicker entanglement. She did bite, you know, and I had regular bruises on my neck and body to prove it.

Her first encounter with the Ontario Regional Police occurred shortly after Dee’s birth and baptism in our second year of marriage. We had conceived a wee girl. We had taken the stroller with the baby and made our way through Niagara-on-the-Lake on our way for tea at the Prince of Wales restaurant. We were supposed to be celebrating my new position in Cambridge, but Janea was having none of it.

She was loud, incoherent, disoriented, and vulgar, but when her fists began to fly, concerned patrons of the restaurant called the police. Certain parts of the altercation made it into the reports and court records.

“You are seeing that trollop again! What’s her name?” was Janea’s frank accusation. 

“Dee looks just like her!” that didn’t make any kind of sense – at all.

“I see you all the time, you two, you’re thick as thieves!” she shouted echoing a line from the Shawshank Redemption which we watched the night before. I sensed her melancholy started the evening before, her inappropriate laughter marking the theatrics of raising her eyebrows, spilling her drink and general agitation.

If you’ve lived any life at all, the sympathies for mental illness, brought on by post-partum depression, or illicit drugs, or loneliness, or the imbalances of sudden growth, could not be denied. I began to read, my only real mistress now, into the origins of Janea’s outbursts. Our Dee deserved a mother, our Dee wanted her mother. I was not about to throw in the towel to our vows even though this situation was getting worse not better. We languished in sickness not health, and our bank account, which by no means was threatened, certainly spent a bundle in her defense, made us poorer not richer. Love is as strong as death I reminded myself. Shall death us do part?

She was in jail shortly after the police arrived at the Prince of Wales. Decking a police officer is never a good thing. The local magistrate placed a restraining order on our little family that very day, my protests and Dick’s intervention notwithstanding. I was already disillusioned by the repeated violence at home, and though I possessed her strength many times over and I was able to fend off both ferocity and fury for the most part. Dick had certainly witnessed the abuse of women but rarely a blow delivered from an adversary like Janea. I pleaded my case every time “it” happened in the unraveling months of our marriage. I was her only mentor and friend, and, by God, she would know it.

In and out of the courtroom, immigration Canada gave evidence to her expired student visa and her previous adventures before the courts, and particularly, those in China. I had Dick to thank for that. It turns out the tattoo was a matter of judicial complaint and not the longing poetry I imagined. In our courtship, Janea had more than once read to me a Chinese poem about a goose that could never fly beyond her hometown. It was like a wilted willow flower and the goose of her poem had a refrain, “Oh, to go home, Oh, to go home!” With a tear and a complaint from heaven the goose, like Janea, longed for home. The goose would talk of hopeful rumors that she might one day be freed. When, she lamented, would the “golden goose” bring her a golden amnesty? “It was too darn hot in Yelang to go home, to go home,” she said.

We were in the midst of a heat advisory, the 15^th of August to be exact, a date in infamy, that brought the end to our marriage. One Janea Ming was deported from Pearson International Airport by Chinese authorities back to China to serve out the remaining sentence in a labor camp. She had a life sentence for a murder of a political dignitary which occurred some five years earlier. As Janea’s colorful and tangled web unfolded we began to sense that her violent past was far greater than we imagined. Her life sentence and imprisonment negotiated with the Canadian government would know no release or amnesty from prison. She was the one who had killed my very dear twin brother Dick. I once surmised that she was insane and that the jealousy that engulfed her included the mirrored image of me, my twin brother. I had gone to my brother’s place for advice on the deportation trial underway in Toronto. As I said, my broken wing and arm was part of Janea’s Shakesperean insanity. If Shakespeare could imagine every way of death imaginable, Dick’s demise was death’s perfection. Death, skulls, misery, at times Dick and I thought it a punishment from God, for lust, or wealth, or idolatry or a wanton disregard for others. I had read that almost half of Shakespeare’s deaths were by stabbing, but just as many victims were beheaded, or poisoned. Janea was leaving nothing to chance, she inflicted all three on Dick’s final moments in my arms. In the process my broken arm was almost severed. I could see why some men of old died of shame, or were torn apart by a mob, or minced into a pie, killed by a bear or certainly even died of indigestion. Shakespeare was now putting pen to paper and describing my own death as vividly as St. Paul had done in his predictions to his brother and spiritual son, Timothy. And then, in a mystery, in the moment of that second impending fatal blow on me, Janea fainted. She was seized by epilepsy, I do not know how or why, but I was alive, and she survived in chains. My brother and I curled together in his death as we had been in the womb – one.

It turns out that a clerical error had delivered Janea to the court buildings on Markham Rd. in Toronto instead of Queen St. where she was to be under constant guard. Seeing no such provisions for armed guard for the Markham Rd. courthouse, a newly appointed clerk released her on her own recognizance. The sad and demented history that followed, as you know, did not tame the shrew. Dick was dead and I was to blame for his fabled end. I sought mercy for my raging guilt, but it was Dick’s death which helped me discover grace and courage. I was younger by minutes and now in his death I became twice the man I used to be, if that makes any sense. I was resolute, determined for Dee’s sake to focus on our tiny family. Time stood still.

Friends and acquaintances, Mom especially, lifted me up in prayer and embrace. Colleagues from Cambridge University at Magdalene College, wrote letters of consolation and encouraged me to come and teach and start life over in England. Whenever I dawned my scarf and colors at Magdelene College or read excerpts from Clives Stapleton Lewis, who held my position before me, I could still smell the faint scent of Janea’s perfume infused into that scarf. I would often read Janea into Wormwood’s tirades against the enemy. Sandalwood, wormwood, galling the memories of a life once dreamed, now like a cooked goose, she had gone home. I had come to terms with that.

Dee, to be honest, was my real consolation. She provided us with new steps of anticipation. There were no lasting scars in her from what I could see. Nor did I entertain my mind’s haunting worries. My Mom, or Oma, as we called her, was Dee’s best friend, and Aunt Liz her constant companion. They had moved into the same apartment in Cambridge with me next door on the eleventh floor. We found ourselves at home in Cambridge and many a night we found ourselves at Vespers or Evensong at Trinity College. The brass rubbings venue at the end of the street brushed new life into us a well. The library of Sir Francis Bacon and the courts of Newton helped fill the void during the rainy afternoons. Every once in a while, in the mirror, Dick was alive in my eyes. There in the mirror, we certainly discovered ourselves again, in our hullaballoo of boyhood memories, and more certainly in the faith we shared. How easy was that?

On occasion we were invited for tea at Westfield House near New College and from time to time I was invited to give a lecture on pertinent transformations in the classic texts of old. It was fall now and the semester was ablaze with rituals, rowing on the river and the beer flowed in abandon. The companionship of my students will always be remembered. And so it was that the joyful days at Cambridge turned from days to weeks and months.

Dee came home with the outfits only Oma could imagine. She sang the songs known to Canadians of German descent. In fact, I had been invited back to Canada for the C.K. Chesterton lectures at Concordia and I planned for Mom and Aunt Liz to take care of Dee. I had seen them off for a short holiday to discover C.S. Lewis’ Golden Valley north of Durham, just yesterday.

I hadn’t thought much of Janea since the day I stole into Pearson International Airport to watch her leave for China in handcuffs and dressed in prison orange. I mourned, like anyone, the ideal marriage penned by Herbert, Longfellow or Keats. I thought of my own wedding with honey-colored chairs, stone fruits and peachy candles. I was thinking of packing my bags for Toronto. Then Janea, for some reason, came to mind at the very moment I entered my apartment eager to pack. Most assuredly I wanted to sit on the balcony with a glass of brandy as I thought of going home to Canada. I had no idea, save the hint of perfumed air, the rose and sandalwood on my scarf, why my thoughts of Janea returned to my memory, as I entered the apartment. I don’t know why, you might think me a bit silly, but I recalled my own plans for her murder, concocted under the influence of more than a dram of whisky with Dick. I had played that subconscious scene out in my mind a thousand times before in guilt ridden amusement. By the time Janea’s past was catching up to her, I had, on more than one occasion, decided how it was that I would release Janea from this vale of tears and carry out my own vision of Damocles’ sword, if needed. In the tottering kingdoms of Greek mythology, a sword was suspended over the courtier Damocles head by a single thread of hair. As I reached for the brandy and snifter near my improvised bar, and with the CD ironically playing one of Janea’s favorite Jazz pieces by Chet Baker on the trumpet, It Could Happen To You. I swallowed the smokey furaneol of grapes in my legendary bottle of Cognac and thought of the poet’s line – “Brandy You Are A Fine Girl.”

Right next to my bottle, stood a sealed bottle of deepest regret. I don’t even know why I kept it except to say it was part of my shame. The poison laced brandy Dick and I bottled in the event of Armageddon was standing right there – labeled with the most delightful golden label, named Juliet. It was hard-waxed, red-sealed with a note: NEVER, EVER, OPEN!  Dick was looking into doping allegations in the 1992 Olympics when he came upon the thought of brandy laced with strychnine. With only 100 mg, a death was most assuredly guaranteed. So, there I was, brandy in hand, sipping to my heart’s content, reading the label front and back intently when I heard those chilling words.

“What’s your poison?”

I could smell the notes of rose and sandalwood rise like a familiar coffee and without hesitation I said, “Timmy’s.”

“I suppose you don’t bite either,” I continued, turning to see Janea. She had a sabre in hand and a smile on her face, head tilted, as if she, too, had played this scene before.

“Brandy, eh?”

“Only the best!” I said pointing, bottle in hand, to the Rosenthal crystal and the inviting cathedral windows and classic legs of the Cognac etching the glass.

“I thought your goose was cooked! Forced Labor, was it?”

“It was until my father saved me! Forgiven, you know, I could fly home!” Pausing… “With Dee…” she added.

“You’ll understand, the proverbial golden ticket – amnesty!”

“Well, how about one for the road? I quipped. My mind raced from Dee to Dick to willful determination to cut Damocles thread of hair.

“To drink or not to drink?” I said playfully. And I threw her the bottle and pointed to a second glass standing nearby. She recognized the bottle immediately, and said, “Saving it for Dick?” with a rasp in her throat.

“No, just you! Always you! A gift from Friar Laurence, do you remember that, Juliet?  Love is as strong as death.” I said and continued to act out the mime,

“Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on,

The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!

Here’s to my love!

O true apothecary!

Thy drugs are quick. Thus, with a kiss I die.

Janea had finished the lines with an emphasis on die. She said those words with me and taking her sabre lopped off the wax-sealed head of the brandy bottle, named Juliet.

My hand stretched out as I gave her the second glass and then I sipped my own with steadied hand and with words that well could be my last.

“Cheers! Janea,” I said, with all the love I could muster.

She poured herself a good glass and drank heartily and said,

“Yea noise, then I’ll be brief, O happy dagger!” and pausing, she looked to her glinting sabre, then to me, and drank some more.

“This is they sheath,” she said, lifting her sword…. paused further, and shuttered…and tottered…

“There rust and let me die,” I concluded. Speaking the benediction as she fell into my arms and died.

I lowered her lifeless body to the floor and sitting in cradled stone, like Michelangelo’s Pietà herself, gave her – my red, red rose – a soft kiss. Then, I picked up my amber glass filling with it again with my own tears and gave a toast to my dearest brother Dick and to a brighter future for Dee, and said, “How easy is that?”