скачать книгу бесплатно
“Just what do you mean by that?”
I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn’t be having all this fried stuff but I just can’t help myself. It’s all so yummy and tempting.”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”
Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.
“I love you, Sky. You’re my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you’d still look better than you do now. He’s been staying at your place these last few days, hasn’t he?”
Sky blushed, and she’s not a blusher.
“He’s so…so…”
“Gay?”
“That’s one facet of Max’s personality. Besides, he’s celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”
“That’s a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn’t it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.
Sky looked even fiercer. “Don’t get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I’m as surprised as you are that he’s good in the sack. But it’s not just the sex either. It’s a business relationship, too. He’s looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”
“I think I need to start worrying about you.”
“You don’t get it. I don’t really count. I’m unofficial,” said Sky.
“Ooo, ouch. Let me think on that one for a minute. YOU DON’T REALLY COUNT. It’s time you started listening to your mother, Sky. All those talks of hers about self-esteem and so on.”
“You’re not listening to me, Luce. Shut up for a minute. What I mean is, I’m something new for him. I’m exotic. By comparison, I mean. You know, by comparison to being with men.”
“Sure you are, dear,” I said in the voice my mother used on me when I was eight.
“And Christ, Lucy, you should see the way he looks in a suit.”
I wanted to see the way he looked in a suit. A suit of armor. Dropped into the ocean, with him in it.
Sky always had been a sucker for a nice garment. Her degree is in theatrical costume design. We met when the university theater department roped me into doing a little set painting for a production of Peer Gynt. During that particular show, she was fighting with the director, who’d slept with her then refused to acknowledge her. She took revenge by using weak seams in strategic places. A few belly dancers accidentally bared their nipples during the dance sequence and some trolls had codpiece problems while trogging around in the Hall of the Mountain King. We giggled like idiots from backstage. Apart from that, it was an uneventful production.
Sky had had a lot of boyfriends back in the university days, but none of them had left her with the day-after evidence that Max had.
“I can’t resist him.” She shook her head, then grimaced and stuck out her tongue at me.
“When are you seeing him again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Of course I don’t know. Why would I know? He’s a busy man. So stop asking me trick questions.”
I didn’t remind Sky of that drunken evening just after I’d gotten rid of Frank. The one where Sky and I started out delicately sipping white wine and ended up falling headfirst into gallons of tequila sunrise, sloppily guzzling and making a lot of drunken Never Again promises. Never Again would we go out with men who were lechers, men who were leeches, men who were misogynists, men who were polygamists—our list was quite long and we pretty much eliminated half the human race.
After all the Never Agains, and since Mr. Perfect still hadn’t shown up, it was just a question of choosing one of the guys off the Never Again list.
I said, “Let’s forget about him for a minute. Let’s not let men ruin our lunch.”
“Good thinking.” Sky suddenly looked like her old self again.
I launched into all my news. Jeremy’s funeral, Paul Bleeker’s big show and small advances, Connie. When she heard the Connie part, Sky said, “I think you need to talk to Reebee on this one. You might need a shot of voodoo.”
Reebee Robertson is Sky’s mother and my creativity expert. In her forty-seven years of life, Reebee has been Rolfed, Reike-ed, Shiatsu-ed, acupunctured, transactionally analyzed, regressionally analyzed, re-birthed, de-birthed, Jung-ed, Freuded, Adlered, Kleined and Winnicotted. These days she offered up her own kind of psychological hodgepodge. Her techniques may not have been highly regarded by the head-shrinking intelligentsia but they worked for me.
For a small painting, she would leave me thinking how wonderful I was and get me unstuck when I was blocked and unable to paint. Of course, I had to put up with Sky snickering on the sidelines at what she called all that New Age drivel.
Reebee had turned a life’s worth of experiments and hapless wandering into a psychology degree. Then she had added a whole lot of other elements—myth and superstition—to her treatment. In her New Age way, she had renovated and furnished her Kitsilano house with favors.
She traded her way through life, something that Sky couldn’t tolerate. “Give me the delicious feel of cool hard cash any day,” Sky was prone to saying, punctuated with, “I’m a material girl.” Sky lusted after clean sheets and her own pristine space. It was hard to blame her really. Reebee had dragged the protesting toddler from a Salt Spring Island commune to Victoria group house to a California Hari Krishna plantation to a hammock on a Maui beach, before finally dumping her with the grandparents back in Vancouver when she decided to go back to university.
The waitress brought our orders and just before Sky threw herself on the club sandwich, she said, “Really terrible about Jeremy. Easter’s going to be awful without him, isn’t it? God, I can still remember that year when we all went out to Cedar Narrows for the big meal. I nearly peed myself laughing, Jeremy making all those Jesus jokes, and your dad turning scarlet with rage.”
“That was Jeremy all over. A terrible tease.”
“Where are you spending it this year?”
“Don’t know. My parents’ place in Cedar Narrows as usual, I guess.”
“You could spend it with us. Reebee will probably be doing something obscene with tofu but there’ll be lots of good wine.” Sky became emphatic. “She really wants to see you. I’ve been keeping her up-to-date, but she wants to see you in person.”
“I don’t know about Easter.”
“Call her.”
“I will.”
“Promise you’ll call her today, when you get back to work.”
“I promise. But I’ve got to do something about the Dirk situation. I’ve got to see my parents and get this thing sorted out. He might show up. I should go out to Cedar Narrows and act as a decoy. Big holidays always bring out the worst in him. If only he’d just come out and behave badly and we could have him arrested. And there’s one other thing about going to Cedar Narrows for Easter.”
“What’s that?”
“Having to show up alone and unmarried when that walking hormone of my cousin and her perfect husband will be there. You know Cherry. She’ll be front and center with Michael and her entire demon spawn and probably pregnant with triplets if I know her.”
Sky nodded and then a wicked smile crept across her face. “You could ask Paul Bleeker to Easter at your parents’. I’m sure he’d appreciate your mother’s collection. All that marvelous sculpture.”
I swatted her with the menu.
I took my time getting back to the gallery that afternoon. Max was far from perfect but at least Sky had someone to stroke all the skin off her arm. All I had was a vague possibility that Paul Bleeker might, if he happened to remember, ask me out again. And even at that, there was no guarantee that he’d show up.
When I got back to the gallery, Nadine’s office door was open and she was moaning into the phone. “So did I, darling, so did I…so are you, darling, so are you…it was, darling, it really was…it was so…what, Night Porter?…no, I rather think Last Tango in Paris.”
I confess I haven’t seen these movies but the word-of-mouth rehashes of the important bits have a wide circulation.
Nadine stuck her head out of the office, glared at me, and continued talking. “Do let’s do it again. I’ll supply the champers and the toys. You supply the…yes, that. Yes, of course I will.”
I don’t know about you, but when I really want a man, I choose to ignore his past, even if it’s a very recent past, like a just-a-minute-ago-on-the-other-end-of-a-telephone past, just as long as it really is past and doesn’t creep into the present or the future. I couldn’t be sure who was on the other end of the line, but I wanted to be prepared for any eventuality. I mean, a man that came with no past, what kind of a man could he be? On the other hand, a man that sleeps with Nadine Thorpe? Nadine Thorpe was one big walking appetite. And Nadine looked flattened and mussed-up today. She had definitely had sex last night. Everybody—Nadine, Sky, Max, that middle-aged Japanese couple, possibly even my parents (repellent thought)—was having sex but me. It was time to take action. It was time to get therapy. I phoned Reebee and got myself invited for dinner that Friday night.
5
It took some courage. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. After the Frank episode, I was afraid to see her, afraid of what she’d tell me because I’d avoided her the whole time I’d been involved with him. I was like a Catholic who hadn’t been to confession in a really long time, and all my sins had piled up so that I was going to Hell for certain and no priest could save me.
I rang the doorbell and waited. Reebee opened up and stood there nodding and smiling smugly. She was tiny, even smaller than Sky. Her long silvery-dark hair was pulled into a braid, and she wore an antique Chinese silk dress that hung to her feet. Her earrings were coin yen with ivory gambling sticks dangling from them. Although it was March, and still cold, she wore thongs on her feet. There was a strange musty odor to her, like closed rooms and incense.
Her first words to me were, “Your aura, Lucy. It’s very strange. Come inside and we’ll fix it.”
“Sure,” I said, “get out your aura repair kit. Why, what’s wrong with it?”
“It’s full of anger and jealousy, with a little sadness thrown in.” She put an arm across my shoulders and said, “I’m sorry about Jeremy. But then it’s clear to see that it was his time. He had to move on. But I wouldn’t worry. His karma was good. He’ll be moving onto a higher plane. Do you want some tea before we start?” she asked.
“Uh…dunno,” I muttered. Reebee called it tea but the stuff she served was mulch in my opinion. “You wouldn’t have any real tea, would you, something with a punch to it like Twinings English Breakfast or Lapsang souchong?”
“Ah, Lapsang souchong. What memories. A remnant of another life.”
Reebee and her lives.
“Yes?”
“It seems I was a Chinese courtesan as well.” She said this proudly. It explained her new get-up.
“No kidding. When did you discover this?”
“Last week. I was having a session and this came up.”
“Go on.”
“It’s not too clear. I just have the end, which is usually the way it goes with these sessions. The death scene. I think I must have been a wealthy man’s concubine, because my clothes were gorgeous. And I had these tiny feet. I was trying to get away, to run, but I could barely walk with these terrible feet the size of children’s fists. I’m sure it was the other wives and concubines who murdered me because the last image I have is of lying on the ground and looking up and there are all these other women standing over me with knives. I was pregnant, too.”
“Oh my God, Reebee, that’s awful.”
“It’s passed. I’ve moved on.”
“Yeah, I guess you have.”
And that was how it went with her. She was always discovering new past lives, and for a while she’d drift around in the costume of the person she’d been until the next life or this life took her over. She’d been a friend of Archimedes, helping him on the construction of the great lighthouse at Alexandria. She’d been a general of Genghis Khan’s, in the end slicing off heads all along the Khan’s funeral route until her own head was sliced off. She’d been at the courts of Catherine the Great and Elizabeth the First. I envied her. She really got around.
Reebee said again, “So how about this tea?”
“Lapsang souchong?”
She shook her head as if I were a lost cause and sighed heavily, “Hibiscus tea. That’s what I’m going to give you. Your aura is demanding it.”
She disappeared into the kitchen and I sat down on her couch. Reebee’s house had a view of the ocean from its glassed-in sunporch. I could see freighter lights glittering in the dark distant bay. The whole house shivered and shimmered with bells and wind chimes, Ojibwa dream catchers, wall hangings, mobiles. It was full of color and clutter in contrast to Sky’s high-rise apartment with its clean sparse lines and neutral colors.
Reebee’s house always made me feel as if there were great and infinite possibilities, that my life could work out the way I wanted if I just applied myself somehow.
She came back a few minutes later and set a tray with two mugs down on the coffee table. Without a word she grabbed both of my hands, scrutinized them, then frowned. “You haven’t been painting.”
I told her about the Viking invasion.
“So the Swedish woman is supposed to help balance the budget.”
I nodded.
“And all this deficit is because of Frank the Writer?” asked Reebee.
I nodded again. “The so-called writer. You’re welcome to say I told you so.”
“I would never say I told you so. Tell me how it ended.”
The ending. It was funny because I had been thinking about the end of Frank just before Jeremy died. A few months back, Sky and I had had the bright idea of going for a drink at the Sylvia Hotel. Of course, I should have realized what a stupid choice the Sylvia was. As soon as I was through the door, I saw Frank. And god, it was like being in a time warp. He gave the impression of having been born in that spot, of never having moved, of having stagnated in that corner forever. The girl sitting across from him even looked a little like me. I felt sorry for her and hoped she didn’t have a lot of money in her bank account.
I knew exactly what he was talking about, because his voice rose above the others, but also because I had endured his rant a million times. It was his party piece, his hobbyhorse. If only I’d known back then what it would all amount to. Back then, I’d thought he was very clever and intellectual.
Frank was going on and on about the play Waiting for Godot.
He’d dragged me to see it shortly after we first met. I’d been up for the whole of the previous night helping to mount an exhibit and was tired when I got to the theater.
The play is about these two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, or Didi and Gogo, who are waiting for this guy Godot. I kept nodding off and waking up and whispering to Frank, “Has he arrived yet? Wake me when Godot arrives.” And Frank just looked at me with an expression that said, “What a pathetic ignoramus!” How was I to know Godot never shows up? The second time Frank dragged me to a different production of it, I found the play sort of funny in places and I actually stayed awake.
As for the third and fourth productions, well, I’d rather not talk about it. Let’s just say I probably won’t sit through two showings when they make the movie.
Afterward, the first time, we went for a drink at the Sylvia Hotel and Frank sat in his spot and lectured. Are Vladimir and Estragon—Didi and Gogo—a sort of everyman, a representation of all mankind? I argued (he didn’t expect it) that it was a thin representation of mankind, and extinct by now, because there weren’t any women on that stage unless it was a futuristic play about cloning, then it was okay. Frank launched in… You’ve missed it entirely, Lucy, the biblical allusions, God in the word Godot, the prayerlike elation in the hope that Godot will come and the certainty that he will not, blah, blah, blah.
Standing in the doorway to the Sylvia’s lounge with Sky, I knew exactly what Frank was saying to that plumpish girl with the red hair, the girl sitting exactly where I used to sit. Frank was even wearing the same old rancid corduroy jacket he’d always worn, the same expression of superiority animating his face. The only difference was that his hair was shorter. Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? After what I did to it.
I turned around and dragged Sky away with me to some more respectable drinking establishment. I hate flogging dead horses.
The day I put an end to me and Frank, the day I discovered the overdraft at my bank and the fact that he’d forged my signature on a cheque, I’d planned on a lot of revenge, mostly cliché scenarios. I seethed and plotted all the way home. I thought of the woman who had cut off one sleeve of each of her husband’s suits and shirts, but that only works if the man has a vast, expensive wardrobe. I thought of feeding Frank one meal so full of chili pepper that it would put him in hospital.
When I got home, Frank wasn’t there.
His daily routine consisted of getting up after I’d left for work, then spending the day “writing his novel,” which was a project that required intense study of nearly all the shows on daytime television, and involved a lot of overflowing ashtrays and scrunched-up cheeseball bags. After that, he was off to the Sylvia Hotel for a few beers in his usual corner before I got home, giving me plenty of time to clean up his mess and prepare dinner. Then he’d saunter in around seven, full of the local lager and himself, ready for his meal.
The night of the forged cheque, I didn’t prepare anything. Food was the furthest thing from my mind. When I saw that he hadn’t come home yet, I went out again and sat in the cinema at the end of the street. It was running a Fellini festival, so for a while I slouched in the seat and watched large lazy women and small horny men cavort relentlessly. I decided to go home when the subtitles started to blur before my eyes.
I approached my building by the back way. The two homeless men who often slept in the Dumpster—I’d privately nicknamed them Didi and Gogo—were there with their shopping carts and plastic bags full of junk, or rather, their worldly goods. They were ready to settle in for the night. It was September and just starting to get chilly.
I waved. They waved back.
Inside, I found Frank sprawled out on the double bed, facedown and snoring. He was wearing nothing but his dingy boxer shorts. The sight of him made me furious. Tears began streaming down my face, which rage had turned the color of a ripe tomato. I went into the living room and screamed into the sofa cushions. If I had been a Fellini character, I might have had the nerve to wake him up and smack him around directly. But I was just Lucy, about to be Frankless, and that meant some act of quiet treachery.
