Hearts of flame, p.19
Hearts of Flame, page 19
“What did she call you for?”
“I dunno what for. I’d cancelled our lunch. She more or less admitted she was having some sort of business problem she couldn’t get out of. Did you know?”
“No,” said Blair.
“She mentioned you,” said Max, again.
“What for?”
Now Max looked at her carefully. She hadn’t changed; she still looked innocent. She wore no make-up. She was flushed, as if she had just run a mile. Her hair, which had once been long and white, was now light brown, chin-length; it was pulled back and tucked behind her ears. “Why would she mention me?”
Max did not have an answer to that. After a minute, Blair stood up. “Nervous,” she said. “Can’t sit.”
“Let me tell you my worst fear…” He told her Ruby wanted to know all about the woman he’d seen jump in front of the train.
“If she’d done that, they’d know,” said Blair. “People don’t jump in front of trains and nobody notices. Anyway, she didn’t do anything like that. She wouldn’t.”
“I guess,” said Max. “But where—”
“But probably you should tell the cops,” said Blair.
Max thought for a moment. He didn’t tell her he’d already spoken with them. For some reason, he wanted Blair to see him as independent of that search. “I don’t really think this is a case for the cops,” he said finally. “Come and get a yoghurt cone.”
They walked together to the underground concourse. The lights were too bright, and the signs were all orange-and black. In the lunch crowd, Blair moved closer to Max; otherwise they might lose each other. He felt like safety. Someone who knew her so long ago, but didn’t know her—and who she didn’t know—at all.
“I guess nobody’s gone back to work yet,” he said. “Shop, shop, shop. I eat at my desk most of the time.”
“I don’t have a desk,” said Blair. “I start work at three. All morning I walked. I keep thinking I’ll see her.”
Max handed her a strawberry cone. They worked their way back up the stairs. “I don’t really know why I called you,” he said. “Except Ruby told me to.”
“Oh.”
“I’m glad, though,” he said.
“Oh.”
There was a pause.
“Well, I’m glad too.”
“Good.”
“What I think it was,” said Max finally, as if he were answering a question asked an hour ago, “I think it was like she knew, but she didn’t know, that she was going away. And she wanted me to kind of, befriend you or something. Which is fine with me. Look,” he said, “my partner Andy’s having a dinner party. Will you come with me?”
Blair smiled. She was thinking about the bird. If it ended up in the incinerator. She’d bet it lived.
When she came into the house from work it was dark, as always. She turned on the light and saw the letter on the radiator. She recognized his handwriting. ‘Though she hadn’t seen it for six months. Her secret lover. He was, after all this time, still loyal.
I wait until nine o’clock. Only then do I feel that you are free, to be on the same wavelength as me. You are alone, your child has gone to bed…
He knew about her job. He knew about Sissy. And he knew about much more.
…this is to say nothing, of course, of dreams. Where we are in the altogether and frolic in a season of gold. I must see you, must know what I feel I know already…
I am bothered by you, in short. And must obey—your voice is wonderful. Sometime I’ll hear you speaking from an inch away through your hair and think God is smiling on us. But down the road is sterility and death. And on the way is a straitjacket. You can’t make this omelette without breaking all the eggs.
He was mad. There seemed no other explanation. He had come out of nowhere to say all this, as if he were a figment of her imagination. But the letter was real. She turned it over in her hand. She was disturbed by it. This time she would keep it in a drawer; she wouldn’t even play at secrecy with this man.
Blair lay awake at three o’clock in the morning.
A dream about Ruby woke her up. In the dream Ruby looked well; it was early morning, and they were talking. Ruby’s face had a renewed look; her skin was radiant and clean, and that made Blair feel elated. But someone was com-ing to the door. Ruby asked for money. Blair knew it must be for drink, or drugs, and that she could not stop her buying it. Don’t, she said, handing over the money. But when she woke up she felt glad. Ruby was alive.
Now she couldn’t get back to sleep. It happened to her every night. Sometimes she would be awake for several hours. Her body lay exhausted but her mind walked over Toronto, turned corners, investigated avenues.
Wild stories had begun to circulate. Ruby had been murdered by the drug-dealing friends of Marvin. Suicided because she had AIDS. Gone berserk because of quack “psychic advisers.” In the stories, Ruby was always the victim. That could not be right, Blair thought. If there was a victim, there must be a villain. Marvin’s face—long-nosed, vain, unnaturally white-skinned—began to flower exotically as sleep leant over her. Then the image burst, warping at the sides, like a photograph with a rock thrown through it, curling around the wound. There was something missing, some factor no one had accounted for yet. Ruby’s will. What Ruby wanted. Maybe she wanted to disappear.
Maybe she wanted to escape the weight of life. No ordinary burial hers, in a black suit with her make-up on, filed in a careful box in rows with other careful boxes. Or burnt, turned to ash so as to conserve space in crowded Mount Pleasant Cemetery. No, she would go in some natural catastrophe, like the one that overtook the Burgess Shale, where thousands of animals were stopped in their tracks, squashed and impressed with mud, preserved, for ages.
Not here and now, like Blair would be, caught between the third floor and the first floor of her house. The mudslide would come down and compress it all to one inch thick, and within that graphic sheet would be all Blair’s things, along with her skeleton. She would be buried and identified by things in the Egyptian way, with a catalogue of things, things above her and directly beneath her that would all fold together, all be reduced to one dimension in this event.
Skis, below, and poles and boots, in the basement furnace room, as well as the Christmas-tree stand and the strings of lights. Then, on the main floor, the CD player and the stack of discs, a brass parrot from Mexico and an Irving Penn photograph of (how fitting) a woman lying in bed draped in white sheets. The photograph was flat already. Probably all that would remain would be the frame, but that, too, would provide interest. On this floor, her things. Her earrings and hairpins, her closet full of shoes and dresses, the creams and ointments in the bathroom cupboard. And up above: on the third floor, Bernie’s beauty aids and momentos of home. All of these things would be buried with her, naming her, identifying her for all time. In fact, Blair’s things were more durable than she was. She would biodegrade, and they wouldn’t.
This was not for Ruby. Perhaps her friend had a warning, advance notice of this disaster coming. And she had chosen to get away from all this stuff, this material claptrap, these goods, by which she lived but by which she did not wish to die. She had chosen to get away and to find an empty space in which to impress herself upon time. She would prefer, since she had to become a fossil, to be pure form. A simple, clear-cut shape, a skeleton—woman, end twentieth century—and nothing else.
Eventually, imagining that Ruby had walked out of the house and had found, miraculously, in the street, a stretch of pampas grass that was very soft, and clean, and cool, like sweet-smelling sheets, Blair’s heart slowed and her breathing lengthened out and she went to sleep, dreaming of a singular and intact fossil.
9 | Dinner at the Colonel’s, and a Bicycle Courier Arrives.
It was Friday. Ruby had been gone for eleven days. All week Blair had carried on at work without much caring what she said. She spent her spare moments calling people who might know something. Writing letters. And walking. Along Queen and King. Up Spadina, down University, up Bathurst. Looking for Ruby. The days went by, one after another, but real time had stopped. Everyone around Ruby was frozen into one attitude or another. Her family blamed Marvin. Marvin wrapped himself in romantic loss. Audrey was angry. Max felt guilty. Blair was disbelieving; she was certain she was unharmed, present, nearby. Ruby could not vanish like that.
Blair adjusted her headset and looked idly at the large white second hand as it swung past six and began to climb. The technician had his hand in the air. When it reached the twelve she began to talk.
“I went to a dinner party last night. You know, ’cause I’ve said before, that I’m a hick from the sticks. I have to tell you, this was yours truly in a foreign country: deepest Toronto. How shall I describe it? Ever so politely, these were stalwarts of every convention you can name: marriage, hard work, good manners, morals, good everything.” She talked to her audience as if they were old friends, as if, in fact, they were Ruby.
“Once I was the kind of woman these men might marry. But not now. I’m a single mother. I kept on with my so-called career, without enough success to justify it. Hey, if you’re going to get up in front of people and make a fool of yourself, you might as well make it worthwhile by being a star!”
The technician was smiling, so she kept on talking.
“So anyway, at this dinner the men kind of squared off right away, talking money and muscles, the usual. What struck me was how the women behaved. Career or no career, they wouldn’t talk business at a dinner party. At least not before they established where everyone stood. Have you ever noticed that? “Do you work?” is not a proper question. So women at gatherings feel each other out. They give little clues. ‘My nanny is taking a typing course this evening, we had trouble getting a sitter.’ Or ‘When I was volunteering in the school library…’ Then once it’s clear who is in what camp they get right into talking about life.
The technician was laughing, thumbs up. Time for music. She hoped Max wasn’t listening.
“Too personal,” said the fat producer, poking his head in during the music break. “No more Toronto-bashing, okay?” He smiled, dropping his chin and closing it upward again, his lips working like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. He pulled his head back and was gone.
Personal, it was, but wasn’t Toronto a little thin-skinned? Walking home after work, Blair’s thoughts returned to the dinner with Max at his partner’s house.
He had picked her up after work, and they drove into Wychwood Park, past the scrubbed brick faces of semidetached homes. There was no place to park. Great mounds of leaves rested at intervals along the gutter, waiting for the vacuum to suck them up.
“Those leaf vacuums amazed me when I came here—the idea that streets had to be hoovered, like hallways. Only in Toronto…” said Blair.
“Just because you have no trees out west to worry about.”
“So who’s going to be at this dinner? Your partner and who else?”
“Old friends we went to school with. Andy has a thing about keeping in touch. And whoever Andy has there with him.”
“Whoever?”
“He always manages to produce a woman companion: whether under false pretenses or with full understanding I can’t figure. Not only that, they usually cook. Sometimes they’re divorced, sometimes single, always attractive and articulate. It blows my mind. Maybe you can explain this to me,” said Max.
“I guess there’s an endless supply of women like that, apparently eager to cook meals for men and their friends.” Blair made it clear she was not one of them.
Andy was gay but in the closet. Or rather, he was gay but only in New York. After looking in on the civil rights struggle in the ’60s, he decided he wanted to be an actor, and went to New York. Nobody knew what he did down there. “It must have been too much fun,” said Max, “because after two years he came back. Blew his little Toronto brain.” Now, by way of atonement, he donated time to causes and kept up old ties.
Max drew the car up alongside the curb in a pile of leaves. Blair threw her door open and slammed it into Max’s side as he was dashing to open it. While apologizing, she trod on his foot. “My fault,” he said, automatically. The last time she’d waited for a man to come around to open a door for her he’d set off down the block and never looked back. Max made her feel nostalgic for chivalry, which in itself made her nervous. Almost as nervous as it made her to be going to dinner with the scions of old Toronto.
It had been raining all day, and the air was cold, gloomy, smelling of plant death. The trees, robbed of their filigree, stood naked and arrogant, fingering the fog-heavy night sky. A voyeur moon was tacked up crookedly over the gap at the end of the street. Blair’s high heel slid on a decomposed leaf and she nearly fell. Max caught her elbow as she skidded.
Andy’s house was gabled, with a wide, covered veranda, older by seventy-five years than the solid Victorians that ran on either side down neighbouring streets. It was the original farmhouse of the area, “built by Andy’s three-greats grandfather,” said Max, acting as tour guide.
“You do find these farmhouses tucked here and there around the city,” said Max, “but hardly any of them are lived in by the original family.” The house was sewn into the straight fabric of lanes and streets and schoolyards; only its idiosyncratic placement—too far back on the lot—its large and well-spaced trees, its country porch gave it away. “See how thin Toronto’s pretenses are? When this place was built it was all cabbage patch and pasture. Andy likes to boast about how carrots keep popping up in the flower beds because that used to be the kitchen garden. He claims that when he dug out the basement to put in the sauna, he found a horse’s skull.”
They walked up to the front step and rang the bell. Stone urns on either side of the door overflowed with past-prime impatiens and Boston fern.
“Everybody grows impatiens in Toronto,” said Blair.
“Toronto’s official flower. Well-named,” said Max.
No one answered the door, so Max kept on talking. Andy’s antecedent was one of those old British colonels who on occasion got up a regiment to fight for the imperial cause. “Make sure you get a look at him; he’s in an oval frame over the fireplace. On second thought, maybe you won’t like him. He helped put down the Riel rebellion. Later he accompanied General Gordon down the Nile. Andy’ll give a lecture on him with the slightest encouragement.”
“I don’t like him already.”
Blair shifted her feet, crammed into old high heels with pointed toes. The decision to come out for dinner with Max was perhaps a foolish one: she never dated any more. She was ready to drop the twenty-year grudge she’d held against this man she hardly knew, but it was only for Ruby’s sake.
“You know these United Empire Loyalist types, don’t you? They act as if they invented Canada. But they’re pussycats underneath. The more gracious Andy’s behaviour—Andy’s always gracious—the more surly I am,” he said. “And the more he admires me.”
The door was finally opened by a gaunt, big-boned woman with the face and hair of Princess Diana and the jaw of Brian Mulroney.
“Hi!” she said, “I’m Belinda, Andy’s friend. Do come in. Jocelyn here will take your coat.” She spoke in an upper-class English drawl that was slightly off. She stepped back, eyebrows arching, eyes fixed on the flagstone where they stood.
“I see you’ve brought in a few leaves on your feet.”
Max and Blair looked down, guilty.
“Don’t apologize, it’s not a problem, we’ll just have to pluck them off, won’t we?” Abruptly, she doubled over, exposing a bony back, bare to the deep V of her little black dress. She peeled a layer of leaves off Max’s shoes. ‘When she straightened, not a trace of colour had risen to her face.
“Sorry,” said Max.
“Inevitable at this time of year, isn’t it? I’m about to call City Hall. Monster piles all over the walks. It’s a menace, don’t you think?”
Blair gave her coat to the stringy-haired young girl and tried to analyse Belinda’s accent. Where did she come from, and why were leaves a menace?
“You’re wondering where Andy is? He’s just settling my daughter with some of her homework. Such a dear he is, I find the science so difficult.”
She led them into the living room, where two other couples sat uncomfortably in little brocade chairs munching on cashews.
“I understand you all went to school together, so I needn’t introduce you.”
“I didn’t,” said Blair, as Max set off shaking hands.
Belinda smiled, revealing small, even, transparent teeth.
“I’m at a disadvantage myself,” said Belinda. “I went to a boarding school outside London—one of the best, of course, my mother made sure of that—but I came out totally uneducated. Got no A levels and I never went to university.”
In her speech there was a th that wounded like f, in the Cockney way, and a choppy woodenness of delivery, which could mean German was in there somewhere. But the school had done a near-perfect job of making an English lady out of her.
“Field hockey, a bit of ancient Greek, needlework, piano, Cordon Bleu, I’m a dab hand,” she said. “But I’ve basically no education and I was never fit for employment.” And with this alarming combination of hauteur and humble confession, she went out.
“Farley and Sal? Have you met Blair Bowker?”
Blair shook her head while Max kept up a running commentary.
Farley had been in Poli Sci and Ec at Trinity College, University of Toronto, with Max. An academic, he played at municipal politics. He was tight-lipped and sharp-eyed; he could have been forty, or eighty. He looked peeled, nearly bald, with pinkish, raw skin and eyes animated by a malicious intellect. Sal, at his side, was a dry, lean woman who seemed made of tendons; her mouth was set in a permanent half-smile, and her gaze established that she dwelt at some distance beyond, a pose perhaps necessary for survival.
