Hearts of flame, p.26
Hearts of Flame, page 26
“I want to know if there’s something I can do to help. Maybe just to talk about Ruby and her problems.”
“Ruby has no problems,” said her mother. “And God will help us.”
Mary’s head inclined this way, then the other, sharply, as she devoured every word. Arthur looked at none of them.
“I feel bad. I wish I’d been more attentive. To know she was in trouble.”
Martha raised her chin off its wattles. “Some other people have trouble with Ruby, that’s why she disappeared, but my girl had no troubles. She disappears, maybe kidnapped, maybe murdered, you gonna say she had problems? You’re as bad as all the rest. You know she’s a big success. She works too much maybe, but she’s got no problems.”
“The last week nobody heard from her,” said Arthur quietly. “Not one of us.”
“I talked to her! I talked to her on the telephone the night she went!” Martha countered. “She called me and said Mum, I paid the bill on my phone card so we can talk. She was in some big public place, like a hotel lobby. Or an airport. I heard a P.A. system in the background.”
The others obviously had heard this before.
“Do the police know this?” said Blair.
Martha waved a limp arm. “They know, of course they know. Mr. Big Investigator Dick Nolan, all he does is see a psychic. She told me some things were not going so well, okay. She had a little problem with her business, I think. She told me, ‘Marvin’s angry because I told him I didn’t want him as my partner. And I don’t want to marry him.’“
“But he’s already married,” said Blair. “That’s not what—”
Martha’s voice was gathering force now. Nobody was going to get her off track. She had kept her family in line this long with the weight of her expectations. She unfurled her powers, like a diva.
“And we had a nice talk that night and I said, you know, Ruby, what about God in your life? Let us pray. Because if things are not going well we call on God. So I said, Ruby, let’s have a time of prayer. And we had a time of prayer.”
“On the long-distance telephone?”
“And when we finished, she seemed very happy and she said I wish I could come out and spend a little time with you and so on.”
“Aw, Mum, she always said that.”
“I’m talking about that night! And then some man came along at that time and I heard her say, ‘I’m talking to Mum!’ As if she were in-tim-i-dat-ed.” She said the word in five syllables, each one equal in value. “He didn’t say hi to me. He took the phone and I said—I thought it must be him, Marvin—‘Marvin, Ruby seems upset, what’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘It’s not Marvin and nothing’s wrong, I’m in charge.’ I said, ‘No you’re not, God’s in charge.”
“He took the phone, which I found odd,” said Arthur, slowly. “But you don’t know it was Marvin. You said it wasn’t his voice.”
“If it wasn’t Marvin it was someone he sent. I know it! I feel it!”
“He took the phone,” said Mary. She had found her place to enter, delicate and determined. Martha reluctantly settled, head vibrating side to side in denial. “I wouldn’t let my husband take the phone when I’m talking. And they aren’t even married.”
“I phoned Ruby that night; she wasn’t there. Or she wasn’t answering. I didn’t know which. I figured Marvin was there. All the time when I call her when Marvin’s there and I say I’m comin’ over, she says, ‘Mary don’t come, Marvin’s here. Marvin’s here.’ So I left her alone!”
Now Mary’s voice, which had been soft and precise, began to rise, like the sounding of an alarm.
“I wanted to help. I wanted to talk to her.” Mary was crying now.
“She didn’t tell you nothing, she never would, Mary,” said Martha.
“We didn’t talk about her problems. She was always concerned about me.”
Blair nodded. “That’s Ruby. She could be going bankrupt, or have lost her last friend, but she’d make a point of zeroing in on your problems…It was how she kept her secrets, I guess.”
“Don’t you go criticizing my daughter! I’ll tell you,” said Martha, shaking her fist, “if you’re looking for excuses to blame this disappearance on the family, you better get on out of here.”
“I’m not, I’m not.”
“Do you hear what that Dick Nolan said?” said Mary,”
“‘You never find a nice girl in a trunk.’ Like this is her fault, and she must be up to bad, evil doings. People say terrible things about Ruby now.”
Arthur appeared to be tired. His eyes connected with Blair’s.
“Now, Mum,” he said. “I think Blair is a friend, you know. She’s not launching any investigation. Are you?”
Blair shook her head. “It’s too late for that.”
“She just wants to talk to us. We all have feelings.”
“We do,” said Mary.
Martha’s face held on to its massive glower. “We know,” she said to Blair, more calmly, “we know who’s done this thing. It’s Marvin.”
“We never liked him,” said Arthur simply.
“None of us did.”
“But if we said something to her about it—”
“—she just went straight back to him with it. I don’t know why.”
“Arthur never liked him. Not from the first. Tell them about when you met him.”
Arthur’s voice was low and slow. He sat back with his ankles crossed, his long, narrow body still military even in repose.
“He parked his car in front of the house here. Flashy red Camaro, white interior, about fifteen years old, perfect condition. And his licence plate was expired.”
The women in the room fell silent as his voice went on; it had a settling, mesmeric quality.
“So I asked Marvin about these plates,” Arthur went on, his deep, soothing voice again casting out the scattered inter-jections of the women. “And he says to me, ‘Oh, I never gets those things. If a cop stopped me it’d take him all day to write up all the tickets and summons I have.’ And I said, ‘Being as she’s my sister I’m really interested in why you’d be driving a car like that. And how did you meet my sister?’”
“I was embarrassed,” said Mary. “I wasn’t ready to come down hard on him.”
“And he answered that they met in Jamaica down on the beach.”
“Well that’s not true ’cause they met at a reception. Mayor’s reception for the designers. Turns out he’s some culture bigwig,” said Mary.
“Slumming it,” said Arthur.
“Not at all! He can’t believe his luck she looked at him for five minutes,” retorted his wife. “You’ve got it wrong,” she dared.
Their words were a kind of chant; they’d been through the verses a hundred times in the past weeks. It was the chant of what they knew, to drown out the roar of what they didn’t know. A chant of anger, to drown out their powerlessness.
“He wasn’t Ruby’s type.”
“She picked up people like that. She thought she could help them. That was Ruby. You know she was so generous—”
“So loving.”
“She saw him as a challenge, as somebody she could help.”
“People latched on to her. Ramone was the same,” said Mary. “She wanted to be like Ruby. She wanted to be Ruby. That’s why she stole Ruby’s clothes. That’s why she ran off with Marvin. I warned Ruby, that woman—”
“She was so good to people. You know Ruby. She was always like that. She was on her way to success and she was gonna take everyone with her.”
“The type of people Ruby gravitated toward really bothered me. You know, I’d been working with kids, in the force. When I meet someone I automatically size them up.”
“We’re talking about Marvin, aren’t we?” said Mary anxiously.
“I’m talking about the type of people. Other people, too.”
“Don’t talk,” said Martha. “Just don’t talk. We’re not telling her everything.”
An open pause, then, while Blair pretended she hadn’t caught their meaning. They weren’t telling her. But she wasn’t telling them, either. Not about the diary. It would be too cruel. She had hoped the family had news.
“I didn’t know her friends,” said Blair. “Just the model, Ramone. And Audrey in the office. But some people say she kept dangerous company.”
The family said no more; lips firmly pressed together, they sat over their secrets.
“Witchcraft,” Martha burst out, breaking faith.
“Not witchcraft! Maybe drugs,” said Arthur. “This Oswald. He told the police Ruby wasn’t dead but her energy had been transferred somewhere else.”
Blair laughed. “That’s just Oswald,” she said. “He’s harmless.”
As abruptly as it began, the chant stopped. Martha relaxed in her chair, her eyes closed. Mary moistened and pursed her tips, repeatedly. Blair let her breath out in little jerks. Children’s shouts from the street came in through the open window.
Mary Mason stood up and offered tea. It was a signal. Arthur excused himself. He clomped up the stairs and came back down with a piece of white paper frayed on the side, as if torn from a notebook.
“Look at it. Read,” said Martha.
It was a poem to Ruby. Something about the night in her hair.
“Where did you get this?”
“It’s Dick Nolan’s report.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Police!” Martha exploded. Arthur stood by the window, watching the sidewalk.
The sun left the room, suddenly dropping behind two housetops on the west side of the street. Mary moved around the room, setting down the tea, turning on lights. Martha and Arthur sat, silent, in their chairs.
“Shall I come and see you again?” said Blair, as she stepped down the front steps. The family was crowded in the doorway, delivered of their anger. Now they looked helpless.
“You tell them that Ruby Mason’s mother says somebody did this to my child because she was in their way. You tell them Martha Mason says my daughter’s been kidnapped. Maybe murdered.”
“Mrs. Mason,” said Blair, “I don’t have anyone to tell. I’m not a cop, I’m not a detective.”
Blair turned to walk away. At the street, she looked back at the house, the faces in the square glass of the door, like faces caged into a photograph, where they didn’t want to be. They were bewildered. Pushed aside, behind the door, like she was, by Ruby and her mysteries.
“Call me, if you hear anything.”
“We’re trying to find out where she is, that’s all.”
“If I can help…” Blair repeated.
They didn’t ask her any questions. And they didn’t say they’d call her again.
Blair walked down the street toward the subway, her purse over her shoulder and a scarf on top of her winter coat. It was cold now, late November. The passion of the Masons’ denials felt like a wind at her back. They had not accepted that Ruby was gone, but how could they? And Blair walking away with her secret.
The only one who knew about the diary now was Max. That was all. Blair figured it wasn’t her news to tell. Besides, she did not know what the diary meant. It could mean Ruby was dead, that someone had her effects. This diary was being sent back like a macabre joke, by a kidnapper, like a chopped-off ear. Or she might have sent it herself, being unable to explain herself. Here is something to understand about me. “The ultimate vanishing act.” Ruby had reason to be angry: here, take me as I am, or not at all.
“We don’t listen to this talk of suicide. We don’t even consider it. Ruby was so beautiful. She took such care. She would want to preserve the body she worked on.”
Blair remembered sitting beside her at the Coffee Express.
“Squeeze my thigh,” Ruby said, pressing it out from the chair with her tight skirt spread over it. “Is it not perfect?”
“It’s perfect.”
Suicide was possible, but it didn’t seem likely. Not because she loved her family and friends. She was not above hurting them. And not because of her beautiful body. But because she wanted too much. That day at lunch, when she talked about Marvin, she was like someone pleading for a better deal from the gods. Yet she told her family she wouldn’t marry him. It was Ruby’s backwards code. Mirror writing: the opposite of the truth. And there was a man with her when she called her mother. Probably not Marvin. Had she found another one already? Ruby usually got what she wanted.
She knew what Max would say: Show the diary to the cops. They might be able to get fingerprints. Or find out where it was sent from. She would. But not just yet. She wanted to hang on to it a little first.
Max. Now everything reminded her of him, connected her to him. How strange, when only the misleadingly reassuring fact that he had had a walk-on part in her life twenty years ago had persuaded her to go out with him in the first instance. She had not wanted him in her life. This suit-wearing Bay-Streeter, suspect easterner who (she thought) killed Hearts of Flame.
It was early yet. She reminded herself that she could stop the feeling, if she wanted. She knew how to put love aside, to shut it in a cold chamber, make it die like an abandoned child. She had done that before. It was how she maintained her footing these slippery years. But perhaps—her mind wandered to Max’s coarse grey-shot curls, his loosened tie, his wide and capacious chest, a place to rest her head. Perhaps this time she did not need to perform the murder. Perhaps she needed not to. The balance had changed; Ruby was gone.
Blair ran down the subway steps and boarded a train going east. She sat on a sideways seat looking across the empty car at the advertisement across the top of the windows. It was a photograph of six good-looking young professionals: three men and three women. They all wore suits. The women’s suits had discreet V-necklines which suggested that voluptuous breasts needed little encouragement to emerge from the crisp corporate lines.
“Each week they embrace the law. Leon and Alana. Olivia and Chuck…Each week they embrace the danger, the pain and the passion of practising their own brand of law. And so can you. Just watch.”
The men and women in their business suits were hanging on each other’s necks, pressing up against each other’s backs, nearly reaching into each other’s clothes. It was an ad for a television show called “Street Legal.” These women and these men were all lawyers. They worked together. They played together. They had sex together, the ad implied. What fun it was and what a good package it makes, what good sense, when you can do all that with the same people in the same place.
Blair looked in her purse for a piece of paper to write it down. There was nothing, so she tore a cheque out of her chequebook and scribbled it there. “Each week they embrace the law…” It was something to sound off about on her show. She already knew what she was going to say. According to this ad, in Toronto, wife-life was becoming obsolete; the office had taken over as emotional-sexual satisfaction centre.
People talk about pornography, like it’s those magazines in plastic wrap, and videos that people smuggle across the border. Well, I’ll tell you what I think is pornographic. An ad in the TTC for one of our very own CBC television shows…
Blair’s lips were moving. She looked around the car: no one else was there except a narrow-faced young man with a pair of earphones on, slunk down in one of the back seats. The subway train raced around a curve and began to slow to enter the St. George station. Blair had to get off. But not yet. She was not delivered from the ad yet. The message was an old one. We Give at the Office. We Take at the Office. With a new addition: We Fuck at the Office. This self-contained, self-sufficient little tribe of lawyers, with their well-tailored outfits and their fluffy hair and perfect teeth, was a new breed of people, efficient as clocks, output and input all rolled into one, all billable hours, as Max would say.
Max again. They made her think of Max.
Blair sat neat and straight on the sideways-facing seat, shocked. If Ruby were there she would have laughed: “It’s your punishment for not believing in love,” she’d say. “You’ve been bitten.” “So we’re back to love again, are we?” We’re back, Ruby, and you’re the one who set it up.
So was that the message? She needed a man to connect with life? But what would Max (or her anonymous lover, for that matter) be able to offer but a place to stand, a thing to be called (“wife”), invitations to dinner parties, where she could stand with Marsha and Sal and talk about kids. To be a wife was to be cut off, too, but in a different way. It was to be joined at the hip, paralysed, marked, tied down, unfree. Blair wondered where the world was in which women participated, truly, on their own. The best time had been when she was twenty, and Hearts of Flame, her “family” of four, was at the centre of the world, its members tied only by the things that mattered—time, place, friendship and creating.
The train’s brakes shrieked as they pulled into St. George. Blair turned her back resolutely on the advertising.
Andy stuck his head around the corner of Max’s office door. His pale face and thinning, mouse-brown hair neatly blended into the wallpaper; he’d be invisible were it not for the dark purple of his lips and the tight, navy noose of his bow-tie. Perhaps the two were related, Max thought for the first time, the pale face and grape-coloured lips being early signs of strangulation. Max was leaning back with his feet on his blotter, dictating into a hand-held tape recorder.
“You busy?”
Max stopped the tape and raised an expressive eyebrow. “I’m always busy, come on in.”
Andy slid around the door, light on his feet and so graceful as to appear apologetic for intruding on the heavy teak furniture, the fat, leather-bound books, the stacked and bulging files on Max’s side tables. Andy’s own office never looked like that; it was picked clean of work. Because he avoided paperwork, Andy’s secretary was never as busy as Maureen, a sore point in the office. Now he had something in his hands, a piece of yellow foolscap with writing on it.
