In a wide country, p.13
In a Wide Country, page 13
“Don’t you wish,” he growled. “No, I’ve got some stuff in this shoot. I’m trying out a line of lingerie. You can’t sell that in a hotel room.”
“Jack, you remember Jasper.”
“No, I don’t. I remember a little boy. This is a young man. You must have done a trade-in. Isn’t that right, young man?” He gripped my hand and gave me a glaring smile. “I’d love to stay and play with you kids, but I’ve got a train to catch. Corinne, I’ll be back in a couple weeks. Don’t make me come searching for you.” He clutched her waist and kissed her again, almost on the mouth this time, and headed for the door.
He had just gone out when another model came in, a blonde in a blue leather car coat, with only a slip underneath.
“What happened to your clothes, Jackie?” Audrey said.
“If I’m going to spend the day in underwear, I don’t see the point of getting dressed.”
“That makes so much sense,” Corinne said, taking Jackie’s hand in both of hers. “What are you, a genius? Jasper, unzip.”
“Corinne’s helping out today,” Audrey said. “Stand facing me, you two.”
Corinne stepped out of her dress and linked arms with Jackie. They put on their model faces, and turned their shoulders this way and that, and grinned at each other like old friends.
“You gals are exactly the same build,” Audrey said. “Same height, everything. From the neck down, you could be twins.”
Audrey gave them the first combinations, and they went behind a screen to put on body makeup and dress for the shoot. She handed me a pencil and a typed list of bras, panties, slips and girdles.
“Sit there,” she said. “Each time I give them a set, I’ll name the pieces and you mark them off. First item is a Sweet Society full-rise panty and modesty bra, plain lilac.”
Marty switched on his big photo lamps. Corinne and Jackie came out and stood before the glowing paper. They posed together with linked arms or bodies half-turned towards each other, not bothering about smiles because the heads would be cut off.
“Lilac, not violet,” Audrey said, stabbing at my list. “Pay attention, Jasper.”
“You won’t see those colours,” Marty said tersely.
“As you always say, but you know very well it helps me keep track.”
After a dozen sets, they took a break. Corinne and Jackie sat in girdles on the leather sofa, and shared cigarettes, and tried on each other’s shoes. I perched on one of the broad arms and pried with my nails at the edges of its domed brass studs.
“Marty, you need some heat in here,” Jackie called, pulling her coat around her shoulders. He had settled his bulk on the edge of the lingerie table while Audrey smoked near the window.
“Are you kidding me?” said Marty. “I’m sweating.”
“We take our clothes off, and he starts to sweat,” Corinne said.
“Jasper, how much is Audrey paying you?” Jackie said.
“I don’t know.”
“You should have talked money first. You’ll probably get the shaft.” They both laughed. I felt a pang of grief at the thought that I could have asked Audrey to pay me. I was still clawing at the brass studs, which seemed as solid as the bolts on the Provencher Bridge, till one of the heads popped loose in my hand.
“I always give him something,” Corinne said, though sometimes she didn’t. I would have said so if I hadn’t been distracted by the ugly nub of steel left where I pried off the brass head.
“What are you giving him this time?” said Jackie.
“Not a thing.” They laughed again and rocked against each other’s shoulders. They were going into a silly shared state of mind that I found doubly hard to appreciate as I thought about what Marty might do when he saw his sofa.
“Poor boy,” Jackie said. She dug in her bag and handed me a half-finished roll of mints. Audrey clapped her hands, and we went back to work. I put a mint on my tongue and held the roll near my nose, inhaling its scent of sugar and face powder, as Jackie and Corinne posed first with one leg forward, then the other.
By the end of the afternoon, they were giddy from laughing at each other’s jokes. They tossed lingerie at each other and did a couple of poses that Audrey said were too racy for any catalogue. But Marty kept snapping.
“I think that’s it,” Audrey said, scanning the list. “Very good, everyone.” She gave me a dollar and Jackie, who had come in a cab, said we should come to her boyfriend’s for a drink.
“Audrey liked you,” she said to Corinne as we drove through town. “You should stick around.”
“That Marty’s a piece of work.”
“All these camera guys are lechers. And with Audrey sitting right there! They used to be married, can you believe it?”
They laughed over this fact, which seemed to sully both elegant Audrey and fat Marty, whose mischief I hadn’t noticed, as he hadn’t seen mine. They had been a couple like Corinne and Dean, and married too, but still worked together, while Marty made subtle mash attempts on the models. A little dew of hope settled on my dream of returning to our Winnipeg life.
We pulled up by a long zigzag cluster of identical three-storey brick buildings set back from a busy four-lane road. A sign on the yellowing grass read: Bel Air Apartments VACANCY. A huge grey oak leaned over traffic from the other side of the street, in front of an old wooden house stuck in an even row of new stuccoed bungalows.
We got out and walked with Jackie across the park-like lawn in front of the apartment blocks. “My dad was a soldier, and these buildings sometimes make me think of barracks,” she said, “but they’re all right inside. You’d think it would be easy to go in the wrong building, but Nick never does, and he’s blind.”
“Really?” Corinne said.
We entered one of the buildings, and walked down the carpeted stairs to the basement. The hallway smelled of frying and new paint. Jackie tapped on the door at the end of the hall, and eased it open. The room was dark, except for a fringe of light around the heavy curtains.
“Nick,” Jackie said. She bent to kiss someone sprawled on the sofa.
“Doll,” said a thick voice. Jackie swept open the curtains. Nick sat up with eyes still closed and groped on the table for a pair of sunglasses. He put them on his slim face and smoothed his black hair with a pocket comb. Jackie introduced us and disappeared into the bedroom.
“Corinne,” Nick repeated. “That’s a name I haven’t heard before. Were you shooting too?”
“Yes, and I’ve changed underwear so many times today, I may have to go without for a while.”
“I thought those catalogues are supposed to have the opposite effect.”
Jackie returned in a white dress shirt like the one Nick was wearing and a pair of men’s trousers with a necktie looped through as a belt.
“I borrowed some of your things, Nick. I wasn’t fully dressed.”
“That’s okay,” he said, stretching his arms behind his head. “They’ll just smell better.” Jackie caught his hand as she passed, and kissed the palm. He felt over that kissed spot with the fingers of his other hand, as if some rare and delicate thing had settled there.
“Corinne and Jasper have been staying in motels half the summer,” she said.
“That’s the way to live,” said Nick. “You come, you go, nobody asks why. Never any bills in the mailbox. Why don’t we live in motels, Doll?”
Jackie put on some music, and took a bottle from a low cabinet near the wall. “You’ve got rye, but no ginger.” She poured rye and water for the adults and orange juice with grenadine for me.
“This place is almost a motel,” Nick said. “People move in and out. There’s four lanes of traffic right outside the window. You can smell the exhaust from here, that’s why it’s the Bel Air. Get it? This whole neighbourhood’s great for phony names. The Sahara’s down the street. In Edmonton, in January, I can walk to the Sahara, in the shoppers park. What do you guess is in that park, trees?”
“What’s your phony name?” Corinne said.
“Rodney Medwood,” he said, turning in her direction. Nick didn’t hold his head in the vague way of other blind people I had seen, but followed the conversation with his face. He seemed confident. I had to admire that, while feeling that he shouldn’t get off so easily with such a defect.
“What are you, an actor?” Corinne said.
“He should be,” Jackie said. “He’s crazy about movies. He’s such a regular at the Sahara, he talked them into giving him a discount because he only gets the sound.”
“Not true,” Nick said. “I pay the same as everyone else. It was the boy who got in for nothing. I had a kid come in with me to describe what I couldn’t get from the dialogue. I convinced the management he was like a seeing-eye dog. He was getting good at it, but his family moved back to the farm. Do me a favour, Jasper, I dropped some coins in my bedroom this morning. Bring them here, and I’ll give you a few.”
On the wall of Nick’s small bedroom, a carved African mask shot out its wide lips and big painted eyeballs. On the bed, a square of early evening sunlight glowed on Jackie’s open car coat. Otherwise the place was as plain as a motel room. A coin shone on the carpet near the bed. I knelt down to look under for more and saw a dark Persian cat nestling near the wall, staring back. I gathered up the coins and, without rising from my knees, laid my cheek on the warm satin lining of Jackie’s coat. It smelled of her perfume, and old leather. I slipped my arm inside the sleeve; the satin shivered over my skin like water.
“Why don’t you put it on properly?” Jackie said from the doorway.
I jumped up. She draped the coat over my shoulders and pulled the peaked lapels together.
“You look like a little general,” she said. I flinched as she dug into one of the pockets and pulled out her Players. “You’re cute, kiddo. But I guess you know that.” The coat slid back on the bed. I followed her out of the bedroom, expecting she would blab to Nick and Corinne about the coat, but she didn’t say a word.
Nick sent me out with his coins to buy mix from a machine in the laundry room, which smelled of dryer-blown air and concrete. From a narrow window under the low ceiling, I could see cars rushing by on the four-lane road, probably heading home. I wanted to leave, to find something to eat, and another motel. I was sick of our wandering routine, but just then I was impatient for it to repeat itself as it should.
When I returned with the mix, the music was louder, the laughter a little wilder. The room was taking on the hazy, insistent feeling of a grown-up party. Jackie took the mix from my arms and poured more drinks.
“How long are we staying here?” I said to Corinne.
“I don’t know, and don’t whine.” She nudged me away and took another sip. “I like it here. You guys know how to live.” She had kicked off her shoes and drawn her feet up where she sat at the end of the sofa. We had eaten nothing since breakfast, and the drinks had put her over the weather vane, as Dean would say. Nick said he would call for Chinese, and groped over the phone’s rotary dial.
“What’s with the old shack across the street?” Corinne said.
“This all used to be a farm,” Jackie said. “The house is what’s left.”
Someone rapped at the door. Jackie opened it, and a short, solid man peered in the room and jingled a big ring of keys.
“Jasper, you want to peek at another apartment?” Corinne said.
“No. Why would I?”
The women left with the keeper of the keys. The music had stopped. I wasn’t prepared to be alone with Nick and his blindness, with no other sound in the room, so I went to the hi-fi and turned the record over. Above the cabinet was a framed studio portrait of Jackie in Hawaiian dress, with flowers in her hair and a lei around her neck. Nick remained on the sofa with his head down, like someone waiting alone, as if the whole reason for talking or being interested in things had gone out the door with Jackie and Corinne.
“Why do you have a picture of Jackie on your wall?” I said.
He turned his head towards me. “You mean a picture I can’t see? Because she told me she had a good set taken, and I asked her for one. I like to have her around all the time, not only when she comes over.”
“Why don’t you just marry her?”
“None of your business. Now you tell me something: What does your mom look like?”
“I don’t know. She’s pretty.”
“Of course she’s pretty, she’s a model. What kind of build?”
“The same as Jackie’s,” I said, with an authority transmitted to me by Audrey. “From the neck down, they could be twins.”
“That’s pretty conclusive. Is she blond too?”
“Brunette.”
“Dark, auburn, chestnut?”
“Auburn, I guess.”
“Eyes, nose?”
“Her eyes are brown, and kind of almond-shaped. Her nose turns up a little, and her lips are nice, but not as full as she’d like.”
“This is great, Jasper, very descriptive. What about her ears?”
“They’re okay.” His questions were starting to annoy me.
“Small, medium, large?”
“As big as a donkey’s. And furry.”
Nick rocked a little on the sofa as he digested this information. “Every woman must have her imperfection.”
“How do you know about different browns?”
“I wasn’t always blind. I remember colours. But I must admit, auburn’s more a feeling for me than a colour.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“I don’t know, an auburn feeling,” he said. “Like a big old tenor sax.”
I heard feet running up to the apartment door, and Corinne burst in. “You’ve got to come look,” she said, dragging me out of the apartment.
“What are you doing?” I said, and shook off her grip.
“Just come. Don’t be so boring.”
I followed her up the stairs to the second floor, where Jackie and the man with the keys stood at an open doorway. Corinne pushed me inside.
An orange light glowed through the windows of the stuffy living room. Marks on the cream walls and small depressions in the green carpeting showed the positions of departed furniture. Corinne led me through the two small bedrooms, the tiny bathroom, and the kitchen, where some of the floor tiles were curling at the edges.
“What do you think?” she said, her face all lit up with booze and new company.
“About what?”
“Taking this place. Moving in.”
I was almost too stunned to speak. “There’s no furniture.”
“Jackie says Nick can get us lots, right away, and we wouldn’t have to pay.”
“You said we were wandering.”
She pulled me from the kitchen into the bathroom, where my own confused face glanced at me from the chrome-edged mirror. I felt like something was closing in on me, as I had in the car when Corinne said we were fancy-free and had left Winnipeg for good.
“We are wandering,” she said, kneading my hand in hers. “We’ll just do it in one place for a while. We need money. Jackie’s got connections. Aren’t you tired of motels?”
“Yes. I want to go home.”
She held my face between her warm palms and studied me with a slightly sozzled frown on her face. Then she went into the other room and told the super we’d take it.
It was nearly midnight when two guys showed up with a pair of beds, a Formica kitchen table with vinyl-covered chairs, a scarred wooden chest of drawers and a couple of bedside tables. Jackie brought linens and a percolator from Nick’s place, and dishes and cutlery to use till we got our own.
Corinne made my bed where the furniture guys left it, in the middle of the room. I slid in with the fresh sheets tucked in tight, and scissored my legs inside their cool envelope. I usually enjoyed this feeling, but the empty room and distant pale walls made me feel like I was in hospital. I got up, snapped on the light and searched for something to draw with. All I could find were coins, so with the ridged edge of one of Nick’s dimes, I put a faint grey line on the wall. The line became a curve, and then a shaggy body with a head, as I drew a large lion rampant with its claws raised towards the door.
CHAPTER
23
the next day, i woke up late and prowled through our new home, noting every imperfection as I imagined Dean would. I found Corinne lying in her bed, staring at the curtain-less window.
“Here we are,” she said, with a faint smile. Waking up in a nearly empty apartment after a night of drinking seemed to have given her a different perspective on our new home.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I said.
“I was thinking about that. We could go over to Woodward’s later.”
“What about now?”
“Maybe Nick has something. Let me put on my face.”
“Just come down as you are.”
“Let’s not have that discussion again. Look, while I get ready, you get busy with the carpet.” She pointed at an old pole vacuum standing in the corner.
Twenty minutes later, we went downstairs to Nick’s. Everything along the way — the brown stairway carpet, the pale green hallways, the frosted ceiling fixtures — looked different now that I knew I would be seeing them every day. Corinne knocked on the door.
“What if he’s out?” I said.
“Where would he go? Though I suppose he could.” We looked at each other, as if trying to measure in our minds the distance a blind man could escape from his basement apartment.
Jackie opened the door, still wearing Nick’s pants and shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. “We wondered when you’d turn up.”
“We’re starved,” Corinne said, and walked right in.
“Help yourselves to whatever’s in the fridge,” said Nick. He was sitting on a kitchen chair under a barber’s oilcloth cape, with snippets of hair all around him on the floor.
