Lucy's Launderette

“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.

I was careful not to make any noise, which wasn’t easy because I was sobbing and hiccupping. I went around the apartment and gathered up all of Frank’s stuff, his clothes and books and general rubbish, and heaped them into a pile by the bedroom window. The window faced the back with the Dumpster and Didi and Gogo. As I was building the pile, Frank snorted and gnashed his teeth a couple of times in his sleep but didn’t wake up.

I left the mound by the window and went to get the scissors from my sewing box. While Frank slept, I sheared a chunk of hair out of the middle of the back of his head, as short as I could get it without rousing him. His hair was shoulder-length at the time and he was quite vain about it. I opened the bedroom window and let the lock of hair waft down to the street below. Didi and Gogo saw me. I waved to them, still silently blubbering, and began to drop Frank’s things out the bedroom window. They hurried over and gathered up as much of his stuff as they could carry or cram into their shopping carts. When I’d finished, I yelled so that the whole neighborhood could hear, “Godot has arrived.”

Frank woke up with a start and said, “Wuzza?”

I threatened him with my aerosol-pump can of pepper spray, told him to put on his disgusting corduroy jacket and leave. He staggered out of the apartment in a stupor, wearing nothing but that jacket and his boxer shorts, and the last I saw of him, he was playing tug-of-war for his possessions with Didi and Gogo at the back of the building.

“That was a bit naughty of you,” said Reebee. “You realize you had to go through it. Being with Frank had its purpose although it’s usually a while before we know what that purpose is. Did you press charges?”

“No. I was too embarrassed. I didn’t want anybody to know how stupid I’d been by putting up with such a lout. I thought I was supporting the next Michael Ondaatje.”

Reebee smiled. “I grew up in the sixties and seventies, Lucy sweetheart. You and Sky, you girls, your generation is miles ahead of mine. I fell for men just because they had nice threads and longer, nicer hair than mine. Now tell me about your dreams.”

Reebee always asked about my dreams. When I first started taking my problems to her, I was always asking whether or not I was going crazy. It was my private terror, that the genetic pool would try to drown me, that I’d become like Dirk, put on a Supergirl costume and start wandering around town harassing people, and not even realize I was doing it. According to Reebee, my dreams could gauge my mental state. In fact, it was Reebee who first encouraged me to start painting them all those years ago.

So I told her about the one I’d had the night before.

Mother was having a big house party. My father was nowhere around, in fact I didn’t even know he existed. It was sort of like our house in Cedar Narrows but it was better. There were more rooms and conservatories and rolling lawns. Drunken guests were sprawling everywhere and having a good time and I was aware that they’d been there all night, that it was light out and morning was coming. I went into the dining room and there was my mother and her new husband sitting at a very elegant table, just the two of them, about to have breakfast, like the king and queen of some land where people did nothing but party. The table was set with white linen and silverware, croissants and orange juice and caffe latte.

My mother’s new husband was Ugo Tognazzi, the actor who was in La Cage aux Folles, the macho one living with the transvestite performer.

In the dream, I was quite pleased with my mother’s choice of husband. When I came up to the table, UgoTognazzi told me that he had decided to give me a present for my high school graduation. He was holding a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and pointing at pictures of fancy black lace underwear. I told him that I’d graduated from high school years ago. So then he said, “University graduation then, you did graduate from university, didn’t you?” And in the dream I honestly couldn’t remember if I had or not. I had the sensation that there was a lot of unfinished business left over from university days.

Ugo Tognazzi said, “Look, this is what I’m going to give you.” It was the same shawl that keeps showing up in my other dreams: the white silk and lace one embroidered with flowers and vines and birds. I was touched by his gesture because it was beautiful. The perfect gift.

Reebee was nodding and smiling.

“What do you think it means?” I asked her.

“Hell if I know,” she said. “You’re the one who’s got to figure it out. But there is one interesting point in there.”

“What’s that?”

“Ugo Tognazzi. You like your mother’s choice of husband, a gay man in the movie, but in actual fact, straight in real life. The actor I mean.”

Then she left the room and came back with a large pad and oil pastels. “Draw the shawl,” she said. “Show me what it looks like.” I hesitated. It was like a smack in the face. It should have been so simple to just pick up the pastel and draw, but I realized that with all that had been going on in my life, it had been at least six months since I’d actually drawn a single line. Reebee looked at me knowingly and nodded as if to say, go on, you can do it.

“While you’re sketching, tell me about Jeremy’s girlfriend. Sky mentioned that there was some problem but I want to hear it from you.”

“Connie.”

I couldn’t say her name without feeling a twinge in the pit of my stomach.

“Jeremy wanted me to keep an eye out for Connie. A request from Jeremy was something you didn’t ignore when he was alive. And I know if I ignore this one now that he’s dead, he’ll come back to haunt me in my dreams. Connie’s pregnant. The thing is, she told me she used to use heroin. Jeremy met her in Las Vegas but I don’t know where she’s from before that. She looks like an old showgirl. One that never quite made it. Not sunny enough, if you know what I mean.”

Reebee’s expression was deadpan.

“Reebee, I can’t explain it. When I’m around Connie I feel like I’m going to be sucked into a black hole. She’s one of the scariest people I’ve ever met and I can’t even say why. But it’s Jeremy’s baby she’s having. That’s if everything goes okay. She was smoking her head off last time I saw her and who knows what else she might be doing while we’re not watching. She looked terrible when I saw her.”

“Go and see her again, Lucy. It was what Jeremy wanted. He wanted someone to watch out for her and the someone he chose is you. That’s a responsibility.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Well, you could ignore your responsibility and just not bother, but can you imagine how you’d feel?”

I nodded.

“Watch out for her. You have to do it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I left Reebee’s after eleven. We’d had one of her meatless dinners of pumpkin soup, blue corn bread and a green salad, and I was starving again. I got off the bus and hurried through the windy streets toward my own refrigerator hoping the Viking might have left me a few measly scraps of something Swedish—some rye crispbread, some pickled herring.

As I turned up my street, I could hear footsteps behind me. I walked a little faster. The footsteps were coming closer. I crossed over to the other side and heard the footsteps cross over with me. I shoved my hand into my bag and groped my little spray-pump bottle full of lemon juice and chili pepper. The footsteps were right behind me. I reeled around to face my attacker, but he had grabbed the bottle before I could squeeze.

6

“Lucy!”

I screamed, “What are you trying to do scaring me to death like that?”

Paul Bleeker said, “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d call on you.”

“It’s nearly midnight.”

“I was passing through the area and thought I’d look you up. I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about you. I was asking myself tonight, ‘Where is that sumptuous redhead when I need her? I’ll go and find her.’”

“At eleven-fifty at night?”

“My best ideas come at night.”

We were nearly at my building. He stopped, grabbed me by both shoulders, moved me over to a cement wall, grinned and leaned in to kiss me, pressing me up against the Virginia creeper. I was too surprised to say anything.

“You live here,” he reminded me, taking me by the hand and leading me up the steps. I fumbled the keys out of my purse and unlocked the main door. His breath was hot on my neck.

Because I was well brought up, I said, “Would you like to come in? I don’t know what I can offer you. I’m afraid I don’t have anything. A glass of water?”

“Get what you need. I want you to come out with me.”

“You want me to? …Uh…sure.”

“I want to drop in on some friends first. That all right with you?”

I nodded.

“They’re artists. Very interesting people.” He gave me an intense look, and added, “Will you model for me? The show only needs a couple more pieces. You would round the whole thing out very nicely.”

Little did I know at the time how literal his words would be.

“And I work very quickly once I have my concept,” he said. “Would you do it for me?”

“What? When? Tonight?” I had planned to go on a diet first. I had planned to lose about a thousand pounds before taking my clothes off in front of him. There was the question of that little roll of midriff lard.

“That all right with you, Lucy?”

In my head, I’d played my encounter with him over and over, the clothes, the moves, the snappy retorts. All I could do now was mumble, “Okay.”

As I unlocked the door to my apartment, his hand slithered around my waist. We moved, crablike, into the hallway. Anna was in the front room doing yoga. Her chest was on the floor and her legs arched backward over her head so that the tips of her toes nearly touched her nose. She straightened out, rolled over, put her feet over her head and her perfect buns in the air.

“My roommate Anna,” I said.

Paul said, “Hallo.”

“Hallo,” came a voice from somewhere under her butt.

He whispered in my ear, “Get your stuff. I’ll wait here.”

I dashed like a fast-forward video clip, collecting things from the bathroom and bedroom and shoving them into a large purse. Everything that deodorizes went into that bag, as well as some new peach lace underwear I’d been saving for a special occasion.

Paul hustled me out of the building and down to where his black Ford van was parked at the end of the street. I thought it was gallant of him to open the door on the passenger side. I climbed in. The van smelled vaguely of gerbil’s cage, and the back was full of black garbage bags. Art supplies, I imagined.

“You know, Lucy,” he said. “I’ve met you before, but I just can’t remember where.”

The light was dawning. I wasn’t such a zilch after all. “Art 400 seminar. About seven years ago. University.”

“Was it there?” He looked worried.

I had the opening. I should have said, “I’m an artist, too,” but it just wouldn’t come out. It seemed like a ridiculous thing to say to Paul Bleeker, one-time Bad Boy of British Underground Art and now Star of the International Art Scene. He was too famous. I’d never sold a single painting. People had stolen my paintings, or traded something for them, but never actually paid real money.

“I got my degree in Fine Arts,” I said to my feet.

He shook his head and sort of half laughed, half snorted. “One of the Ivory Tower lot, are you, duckie? Thought you would be safe in the cocoon of academia? No one’s safe.” His British accent was back. He laughed again. This time, it was a weird, quiet snicker-snacking sound.

There’d been a lot written about Paul. About how he’d run away from home at the age of thirteen because his father had wanted him to go into the corner-store grocery business with him. How his mother had died when he was ten. How he’d lived hand-to-mouth with a group of derelict artists that eventually became known as the East Sheen Group. And then how the East Sheen Group picked over refuse heaps looking for usable materials for their works.

I’d read all about Paul Bleeker’s breaking out of the Group with a one-man show of his own, all crafted in found bits of rusting metal. He had been involved in big conceptual projects, too, like the one that got him three days of jail—the giant game of Cat’s Cradle over Stonehenge, using bungee cords and professional rock climbers.

As for his personal life, he had stated in the interviews, “I like women if that’s what you nosy lot want to know.” There was a lot of speculation about who his women were in those days, but nothing concrete was reported.

I remembered this and sighed to myself. He was gorgeous. He reminded me of the singer from Wet, Wet, Wet.

Okay. Yes, I confess, I’ve always been a bit of a Wettie. Paul Bleeker’s resemblance to Marti Pellow was strong enough in certain moments that I half expected him to croon all those lyrics about wanting to get close to me, right into my ear in the same languid sexy tones. If he could sing like that, I would willingly be his slave.

I snuck glances at Paul as he drove. He certainly had a profile like Marti Pellow’s. He had those same dark, sexy looks. But I could see there wasn’t going to be any serenade. Paul was a busy man, a true artist with true art to make. What I hadn’t realized before was that a working artist had to make sacrifices. He had no time to be crooning or sitting around in places like the Rain Room drinking big sloppy drinks with little umbrellas in them.

We drove in the direction of the university. I was encouraged. It was an area of big comfortable wooden houses with large yards and beautiful gardens. I could picture us already, standing around in a plush living room with a bunch of savvy people discussing art with a capital A and drinking a decent chilled Italian white wine, while we waited to help ourselves to the buffet, which the considerate hosts had prepared. I was starving.

Paul stopped the van in front of a brown house with peeling paint and a garden that featured, above all, waist-high thistles, dandelions and morning glory. Paul reached across the gear shift and touched my cheek. “You’re an artist. You’ll like these guys, luv. Old-fashioned Bohemians.”

An artist! A famous artist had just called me an artist. How did he know? He hadn’t even seen my work. Maybe someone had told him about it. Nadine perhaps. It didn’t matter. I climbed out of the van and followed him into the darkness. He was pushing his way through the overgrowth that blocked the path leading around the side of the house to the back. I stayed close, getting whipped in the face by the branches as they left his hand and snapped backward.

A dim bulb lit the stairs leading up to the back door and revealed a yard full of junk. Most of it was rusting scrap metal. There was even part of a smashed-up Cadillac, its massive snout crinkled up long ago in some nightmarish impact.

I followed Paul closely. The steps weren’t safe. There were more rotten boards in the staircase than good ones. Paul seemed to know his way because he bounded fearlessly up all the right ones while I picked my way as if through a field of land mines trying to ignore the dangerous splintering noises under my feet. Paul didn’t bother knocking. He just walked right in.

The kitchen was in darkness but I could make out the sink full of unwashed dishes, the take-out Chinese food and frozen TV dinner boxes piled on the kitchen table and counters. And I couldn’t help but notice the paraphernalia. Paul caught me staring and said, “The lads like to do a little spliffing-up from time to time.” There was a contraption in the corner that was straight out of Alice in Wonderland. All it needed was a caterpillar.